UPDATED 08:00 EDT / MAY 05 2021

CLOUD

Splunk launches Observability Cloud for multicloud application environments

Data analytics firm Splunk Inc. is revamping the application and infrastructure monitoring experience for customers with the launch of its new Splunk Observability Cloud that helps detect operational issues affecting apps and the environments they run in, as well as providing investigation and troubleshooting capabilities.

The Splunk Observability Cloud is being made generally available today after it was unveiled during the company’s October 2020 Splunk .conf event. The company said at the time it was launching Splunk Observability Cloud to address the enterprise shift to multicloud information technology architectures.

That shift can cause major headaches for DevOps teams as it means their applications and services run across a sprawling infrastructure environment, making it hard to keep track of everything that happens within it. With the Splunk Observability Cloud, DevOps and IT teams get the benefit of a unified interface that helps to keep track of all their application monitoring data that comes from sources such as app metrics, traces and logs. This data is collected in real-time at any scale, Splunk said.

“With the shift to cloud, IT and DevOps teams are now wrestling with more operational complexity that is compounded by too many existing monitoring tools that have blind spots, siloed data and disjointed workflows,” said Splunk Chief Product Officer Sendur Sellakumar. “The Splunk Observability Cloud helps IT and DevOps teams conquer complexity and accelerate cloud transformation for their organizations.”

IT observability is an emerging market segment that’s rapidly becoming a big deal for many enterprises. It involves monitoring apps so that operators can identify the root cause of any issues that crop up and resolve them quickly.

Other players in the observability segment include Sumo Logic Inc., DataDog Inc., and also Amazon Web Services Inc., which yesterday launched its Amazon DevOps Guru product. With its history rooted in big data and infrastructure and application log intelligence, Splunk sees observability as a natural target for its own expertise.

Splunk said its Observability Cloud combines its Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring, Splunk Application Monitoring, Splunk On-Call, Splunk Real User Monitoring, Splunk Synthetic Monitoring and Splunk Log Observer offerings into a single product. The last three tools are all new products being made generally available today.

Splunk Log Observer is a new logging tool that helps DevOps teams to better understand application and infrastructure behavior, while Splunk RUM is specifically aimed at troubleshooting web browser performance issues. Splunk Synthetic Monitoring is meant to help improve the uptime and performance of application programming interfaces, service endpoints, business transactions and user flows.

Spiros Xanthos, vice president of product management, observability and IT operations at Splunk, said the new service is designed to make life easier for developer teams that have previously had to rely on multiple tools for monitoring and managing their apps. “The Splunk Observability Cloud brings all the needed observability solutions together in a unified interface designed to help customers gain a comprehensive view across all their data and operate at enterprise scale,” he said.

One key advantage Splunk has is that the offering is OpenTelemetry-native, which means it relies on “vendor-neutral” APIs, software development kits and other tools for collecting telemetry data from cloud-native applications and their supporting infrastructure. That means it can unify data ingestion without any problems around vendor lock-in, while also reducing resource consumption, Splunk said.

Analyst Holger Mueller of Constellation Research Inc. told SiliconANGLE that observability is the new buzzword for managing complex system landscapes that span on-premises and multiple cloud environments. He said Splunk is in a great position to tackle this.

“Splunk Observability cloud is not a version 1 product because the company is able to build on the rich automation history and proven products it has previously delivered earlier for running and monitoring systems,” Mueller said. “The interesting thing to follow is how this bundled version will interest Splunk’s customer base.”

Splunk does have at least one big fan already in the shape of Lenovo Group Ltd. The Chinese firm said it was able to reduce its total cost of ownership while cutting troubleshooting time in half during one of its busiest sales days last year.

“With Splunk Observability our mean-time-to-resolution went from 30 minutes to under 5, allowing us to maintain 100% uptime through Black Friday traffic, which was 300% higher than the previous year,” said Ben Leon, Lenovo’s director of online and ecommerce operations. “Splunk Observability has greatly improved our operational efficiency, team collaboration and troubleshooting time to ensure that we are always providing the best experiences for Lenovo customers.”

Splunk is also hoping to tempt customers with a new, simplified pricing model that it says is directly tied to the value IT and DevOps teams will gain.

Sendur Sellakumar, Splunk’s senior vice president of cloud and chief product officer, said that in the past, Splunk’s tools were priced on the amount of data companies ingest, but he said that some customers had complained that this limits their ability to leverage all of the data they have available, and makes it more difficult to forecast costs. To that end, Splunk has come up with a new “entity pricing model” for Splunk Observability Cloud.

“This model makes it easier for you to budget for and buy Splunk based on how you measure your business,” Sellakumar said. “An entity can be users or hosts, or IP — it all depends on which Cloud you are leveraging. We’ve got clear definitions on what each Cloud counts, and we provide you flexibility so that as your technology approaches change (say from VMs to containers to serverless or from logs to metrics to traces), we’ve got you covered in our approach so you don’t need another purchasing cycle.”

Image: Splunk

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