theCUBE Live At Splunk.conf 2014

Splunk, Inc. kicked off its annual user conference in San Francisco last week with new products and services aimed at bolstering the company’s big data muscle.  Splunk is working hard on making its machine data accessible and usable to more kinds of people.

Splunk has announced a new platform to help mobile app developers and security experts gain insights into the apps they’re creating. Splunk said that it will team with Amazon Web Services to offer Hunk. The offering can help security analysts obtain more comprehensive protection against modern threats, risk management professionals can analyze raw big data without sampling, and product managers can understand granular data to plan new products.

DevOps is not just for IT anymore

In the beginning, Splunk’s big data machine analytics tool was primarily built for system administrators who used it to access log files when troubleshooting problems. But soon people realized that machine data is diverse. Splunk’s newest tools open machine data analysis not only to IT organizations but increasingly to business users themselves.

The company updated Splunk Enterprise to version 6.2 to make it easier for more people within enterprise to use. Splunk’s vision is to expand DevOps culture and permit casual and less technical users to gain business insights from machine data. For instance, the new instant pivot feature is designed to let users pivot directly from search, so they can easily create dashboards without having to know the Splunk Search Processing Language. The dashboard has been revamped to make it much easier for non-technical users to package searches, create prebuilt visualizations, and share them.

Splunk also announced Splunk MINT Express, its product that collects information about mobile apps based on BugSense technology. The technology gives developers data about the performance of their mobile apps, like crash information and whether crashes are localized or widespread, how many daily active users were on the app, and which OS version they used. With the SDK, available for Android and iOS, developers can introduce a single line of code to applications that will get the job done.

The company also rolling out Splunk MINT Enterprise, which combines the mobile data with Splunk’s enterprise data. By combining multiple data sources from web, mobile, server-side, database, network, etc. DevOps teams have a greater visibility of the entire system to better understand bottlenecks, failures, and discover root causes.

The intersection of DevOps

Splunk plans to tackle DevOps head on by creating an “all over tool” that facilitates interaction between developers and operation. The company’s Director of Developer marketing, Jon Rooney, said DevOps is essential because it enables companies to iterate more rapidly, ship faster, and learn based on customer reception of those features. Splunk helps developers access customer-generated data. Moreover, he said, Splunk offers developers the tools to work with that data.

More companies than ever are looking for data-driven outcomes and DevOps requires organizations to focus on the same goals, also while bridging  expertise between different departments. Dave Fiveash, The Global Market & Counterparty Risk Support Manager at Banque Nationale de Paris (BNP) Paribas said that the DevOps challenge is more pressing in today’s IT departments as companies need the discipline of keeping deadlines and finding ways to keep everyone together in the DevOps culture.

He added that Splunk had been a great help in that regard, especially in giving developers access to data without accessing the actual host, at the same time, getting them closer to customers.

Empowering data analysis and beyond

While Splunk applications help the workplace to become more productive, the data management platform also helps companies engage with customers. Forrester Analyst John Rakowski said in theCUBE interview that Splunk’s ability to deliver more automated services around data analytics could both empower brands from the IT department and beyond.

Mark Debney, Principal Engineer, DevOps, at British Sky Broadcasting group plc. bSkyb, shared that by adding Splunk to their arsenal, the security team spending more time scaling than fighting the security attack. The DevOps team spend a lot for time writing the application that was intended to keep the company safe and enable the security team to automate a number of real time threat identification rules.