Applications took the center stage in the analytics world this past week, with Splunk Inc. introducing a new add-on for its hugely popular log management platform that extends support beyond just data from infrastructure components  to the traffic flowing among the services running on top.  The software represents the first product to implement the technology it obtained as part of the acquisition Cloudmeter Inc. last year.

Splunk App for Stream, as the offering is called, opens up a new layer of transparency that provides visibility into valuable data points such as performance and usage patterns, according to the firm. That insight can be useful for optimizing user experience and  identifying malicious activity, but also raises privacy concerns that will require organizations to be compliant in how they use the software.

Meanwhile, AppDynamics Inc., a company that focuses exclusively on application performance monitoring, is also promising to give customers a more complete view of their environments with the newest version of its namesake offering. The release introduces a self-learning transaction engine similar in functionality to Splunk’s latest tool and tops it off with a host of new data visualization capabilities aimed at making it easier for users to make sense of the vast amounts of information  generated by their apps, including a Hadoop-based drill-down dashboard.

Rounding out the package is enhanced support for real-time operations, a priority that AppDynamics shares with Oracle Corp, which kicked off the Hot Chips conference in Cupertino with a record-breaking new iteration of SPARC processing architecture specifically geared towards crunching data in-memory. The 32-core M7 ships with built-in accelerators for compressing and decompressing information on RAM that remove much the overhead usually involved in the process. The reduced resource consumption allows customers to take more advantage of the chip’s more than 10 million transistors, a figure that places it at the very top of the density chart and translates into an over 300 percent performance improvement over the previous generation.

photo credit: CJ Isherwood via photopin cc