Splunk enables organizations to monitor, search, analyze, visualize and act on massive streams of real-time and historical machine data. Splunk Storm, which is aimed at companies who develop their applications in the public cloud and provide for infrastructure services such as AWS, Heroku, Google App Engine, or Rackspace, uses Amazon EC2 as its infrastructure, and also uses Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS), Amazon Elastic Load Balancing (Amazon ELB), AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM).

Extending the Amazon cloud reach, Splunk announced a free analytics-as-a-service product based on the Amazon Web Services cloud at the Splunk Conference 2013. Organizations can now access Splunk Cloud to gain visibility and operational insights into their machine-generated big data in the cloud, as well as correlate this data across their cloud and on-premises environments.

Splunk Cloud, powered by AWS, includes access to all features of the award-winning Splunk Enterprise platform including apps, APIs, alerting and role-based access controls. Splunk Cloud supports all core Splunk Enterprise use cases including application management, digital intelligence, IT operations management, security and more. Splunk Cloud also integrates with on-premises deployments of Splunk to deliver visibility into operational status, KPIs and security postures across all environments.

“Our mission is to make machine data usable, valuable and available to you — any type of data anywhere. You told us something very interesting, you told us that machine data in the cloud requires enterprise grade software, for us that means Splunk Enterprise in the cloud. That’s exactly what we are delivering to you, you are getting all the features of Splunk Enterprise in the cloud,” said Dejan Deklich, VP of cloud engineering at Splunk.

“We have built Splunk Cloud with enterprise production use cases in mind. For us that means massive data volumes, starting at several gigabytes per day going up to many terabytes per day. You can forward data to Splunk Cloud from anywhere, you can forward it from your on-premise environment, or from your many and varied cloud deployments,” Deklich added.

This new service will be available with an annual subscription from 50GB a day to 1TB a day of machine data, while free developer offerings are available for up to 20GB of total storage per month.

Data to drive efficiency

Machine generated data is nothing but data generated by websites, applications, servers, storage, network, mobile, and other devices–including system sensors. Splunk’s new offering allow IT outfits to monitor, and analyze these often disparate sources of data, which is generally quite a challenging task because of the level of integration this requires.

The service allows users to run queries on the data, but instead of using SQL or similar technical query languages, the company uses a proprietary search processing language (SPL), making it much easier for non-IT personnel to use the service. Splunk also included a drag-and-drop pane for simplifying the process of comparing these data sources. Other features include cluster management, access control, PDF delivery of reports, dashboards, pivot tables, searching, indexing, and alerting.

“The Splunk vision of delivering its software as a service across any type of user scenario allows its customers greater choice,” said Dennis Callaghan, senior analyst at 451 Research.

“By providing an enterprise-class cloud service with all of the features of its flagship product, Splunk is making a strong statement about doing business in the cloud and looks to cement its position as a leader in the operational intelligence market, across all modes of delivery.”

Splunk Enterprise 6, the platform for machine data that Splunk released at the conference, delivers powerful and fast analytics, up to 1,000 times faster than previous versions. With an enhanced user experience, simple management of enterprise deployments and a rich developer environment, Splunk Enterprise 6 gives technical users the ability to define the meaningful relationships in the underlying data, enabling business users and analysts to easily manipulate and visualize data in a simple drag-and-drop interface.