Although there are compelling operational benefits to be had from moving email to the cloud, most enterprises still maintain at least some part of their Exchange environment in-house. And more often than not, that on-premise hardware will eat up a disproportionate chunk of the IT budget due to the sheer complexity of keeping an entire organization’s communications backbone running smoothly day in and day out.

Splunk is hoping to make things a little easier with a purpose-built extension that taps into machine data from the supporting infrastructure to give administrators a better view of their deployments. The third release of Splunk App for Microsoft Exchange was unveiled this morning at the Redmond-based software giant’s annual email conference.

The new version introduces a first-of-its-kind dashboard builder that takes advantage of the Google-like search functionality which helped popularize Splunk’s log analytics platform to push the envelope on real-time monitoring. It allows users to look up keywords pertaining to the health and performance of specific services and incorporate the results into custom reports that can be shared with colleagues, all within a single interface. The tool marks another step forward in bringing ubiquitous search to the world of Big Data, a massive opportunity that SiliconANGLE founder John Furrier had identified back at Splunk.conf 2013.

“Splunk could use the search leverage, the fact they have such a great platform, and become a de facto standard for application developers,” Furrier remarked during theCUBE’s closing segment at the event. “They could flip the game upside down and become the standard for this Big Data application ecosystem.”

Besides the dashboarding tool, the updated app also features a set of pre-built reports that Splunk says provide insight into relationships between performance, health and security events throughout the network. They enable admins to track messages from the point of origin to the gateway while also providing information about the volume of emails and the number of active users at any given time, simplifying capacity planning. Plus, version 3.0 makes it possible to correlate data across Exchange and third party services such as proxy servers and firewalls to identify potential security risks and other anomalies.

The new features builds on Splunk’s existing data visualization capabilities, and add more tension to the company’s partnership with Tableau, which was recently expanded with the release of an ODBC driver connecting the two firms’ respective offerings.