Splunk Inc. said during its annual Splunk .conf event today that it’s beefing up its suite of data analytics products so customers can accelerate their cloud transformations.

Splunk’s Data-to-Everything Platform is an all-encompassing suite of analytics tools that help enterprises to search, correlate, analyze, monitor and report on data in real time, available through its Splunk Cloud and Splunk Enterprise products.

Today’s slew of updates at the virtual event are all about expanding customer’s multicloud capabilities, giving them new ways to set the right data strategy and improve access to the information their businesses generate, Splunk said.

Machine learning focus

For example, the Splunk Data Stream Processor, an event streaming platform, is being updated with new capabilities that enable it to access, process and route real-time data from multiple cloud services, including Google LLC’s Cloud Platform and Microsoft Corp.’s Azure Event Hub. In addition, event data now gets enriched with lookups and machine learning functionality that helps to minimize compute loads and provide more accuracy when searching through this data.

Moreover, the Data-to-Everything Platform is getting a new Splunk Machine Learning Environment that will make it easy for companies to build and operationalize machine learning models by bringing data from multiple sources into a single platform.

Those updates will both be available later this year, Splunk said. But customers that want to tap into Splunk’s platform from Google Cloud will not have to wait, as the Splunk Cloud on Google Cloud service is being made generally available starting today, the company announced.

Splunk first revealed Splunk Cloud would be coming Google Cloud back in May. It said at the time it was integrating its platform with several Google Cloud services to enable enterprises to get more actionable insights from their data and drive faster decision-making, so it’s a pretty big deal.

With Splunk Cloud on Google Cloud, customers will now be able to access Google’s artificial intelligence and machine learning services and power these with data from Splunk, for example. Meanwhile, the integration with Google Anthos and Google Cloud Security Command Center will help to ensure the most critical Splunk data can be shared among various cloud-based applications. That means customers will be able to draw new insights from their multicloud platforms.

Constellation Research Inc. analyst Holger Mueller said the availability of Splunk on Google Cloud is an important milestone, since Google has a strong lead over rival cloud platforms in terms of its AI and machine learning capabilities. “Given the importance of AI and ML for DevOps, Google Cloud is a key platform for Splunk customers,” he said.

Early access customer The Auto Club Group said it had seen some immediate benefits using data with added context from Splunk on Google Cloud.

“Splunk Cloud on Google Cloud helps us drive significant enterprise agility and business value with data-informed decision making as a core competency for our organization,” The Auto Club Group Chief Information Security Officer Gopal Padinjaruveetil said in a statement.

New observability suite

The shift to a multicloud, while beneficial, can also cause some major headaches as it means companies are forced to manage a sprawling information technology infrastructure environment that covers multiple platforms, services and products. Luckily, Splunk is here to lend a helping hand with that too, launching a new Splunk Observability Suite that provides monitoring, investigation and troubleshooting capabilities to help companies manage that shift.

IT observability is rapidly becoming a big deal, and involves monitoring apps by pulling data from logs, metrics, traces and events so that operators can identify the root cause of any issues that crop up and resolve them quickly. Being all about the data, that makes it a good fit for Splunk.

The company said the Splunk Observability Suite combines infrastructure monitoring, application performance monitoring, digital experience monitoring, log investigation and incident response capabilities into a single product. The idea is to help IT and DevOps teams to maintain the performance of their most critical apps and keep downtime to a minimum.

Mueller said it was good to see Splunk making a play in observability, because it eliminates a lot of data that humans would otherwise have to wade through manually to get insights from.

“It enables a better way to analyze data, so enterprises can more easily monitor their next-generation applications and achieve the Holy Grail of automated software operations,” Mueller said.

IT ops and security

Splunk is also updating its suite of IT Operations tools that are used to simplify operations, prioritize issue resolution and provide visibility into customer’s most critical services.

The Splunk for IT Operations Management and Monitoring suite, as it’s called, is getting a new product called Splunk Service Intelligence for SAP. The new product builds upon Splunk’s partnership with SAP SE and brings new, AI-based monitoring capabilities that should give customers more visibility into their SAP environments, allowing them to better monitor and resolve any issues with the business services they support.

Splunk also announced updates to its existing Splunk IT Service Intelligence, Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring Add-On and Splunk IT Essentials products. Finally, it said it’s adding new AI-based capabilities for Splunk Enterprise Security, Splunk Mission Control and a new Splunk Mission Control Plug-In Framework that combine to offer better threat detection, investigation and remediating capabilities for its customers.

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