In the world of cloud and mobile, businesses have discovered the power of DevOps and continuous uptime. DevOps already provides a consistent paradigm for viewing continuous deployment of software by pushing automation as a path to speed delivery through each stage; but on the operational side being able to predict, prevent, or recover from flaws quickly via automation and monitoring has strong roots in DevOps practices.

Tools for monitoring and automating reactions to problems are common, but Splunk, Inc. is hoping its DevOps strength and popularity with enterprises can launch it into new markets in the cloud.  The company today announced that it’s cutting the price of its Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) cloud platform by one-third and opening it up to developers. Importantly, Splunk’s outreach to developers includes the addition of a free Development Sandbox, which gives developers a chance to build and test applications before buying in.

Splunk is already a well-known tool for monitoring, aggregating and analyzing within enterprise computing environments. It supports multiple platforms and uses ranging from boots-on-the-ground DevOps to IT monitoring of critical infrastructure to turning log data into operational intelligence. With more companies transitioning to the cloud, Splunk seeks an opportunity to address common problems there.

“We’ve been seeing organizations start to move their mission-critical applications to the cloud, but many still see availability and uptime as a significant barrier,” said Dennis Callaghan, senior analyst at 451 Research.

Splunk Cloud is claimed to be the most comprehensive SaaS platform for operational intelligence on the market. It offers the full power of Splunk Enterprise a cloud-based service that Splunk says is flexible and easy to deploy.

Splunk reaching out to cloud and SaaS developers

Another part of today’s announcement is the Splunk Online Sandbox, a free tool that enables developers to test a monitoring application or schema in minutes. Splunk posted a demo video here.

The free trial sandbox is full-featured but limited in scale. Users get a private workspace to try out search, analysis, and visualization of their own data, or simply play around with prepopulated data. The sandbox includes a built-in tutorial for developers not familiar with the product or as a refresher for those who are used to Splunk’s system but have not gone hands-on with the cloud platform.

Splunk Cloud also comes with a full set of RESTful APIs, an SDK for rapid prototyping and documentation for developers to get going quickly. Developers are limited to 5 GB or data uploads per day and 20 GB of total data stage. While small, that should be more than enough for users to explore the full capabilities of the Splunk SaaS cloud analysis platform, the company said.

Reducing cost, increasing uptime

Splunk also cut prices by nearly one-third. Splunk Cloud is available now in the U.S. and Canada starting at $675 per month for up to 5GB/day of data indexed (down from $1,000 per month).

Splunk Cloud provides the full feature set of Splunk Enterprise, making it a viable alternative to the on-premise platform, Splunk said. The cloud version includes apps, SDKs, APIs and the same platform support as the packaged version. The service runs on Amazon Web Services and supports data volumes of between 5GB/day and 5TB/day. Splunk hopes that the increased stability and cloud interface will be compelling to companies that need the power of monitoring and visualization that they’ve enjoyed behind the firewall applied to their apps in the cloud.