Splunk Inc. and New Relic Inc., a pair of companies that offer specialized big data analytics, have decided their services can work better if married together. To that end, they announced a strategic alliance on Wednesday to make it happen.

The companies said they’re integrating Splunk’s back-end information technology monitoring platform with New Relic’s application and code tracking solutions, so IT operators and developers can share data between the two.

Splunk’s platform is popular with IT operations people because it offers them a ton of useful data about the hardware they’re meant to look after. New Relic’s tools are just as popular with developers, because they provide useful data about the performance of their code and how it impacts user experiences.

It was actually possible to connect the two platforms together before, because both Splunk and New Relic have application programming interfaces to enable it. However, the companies admitted it can be painstaking to get those APIs to work, whereas the new integration means it should take a matter of minutes to grab data from one platform and pipe it into a dashboard run by the other. Users can publish Splunk data in New Relic and vice versa, the companies said.

The companies claim their users will be able to enjoy a much wider view of their operations by merging the two data sources. They explain that server issues, for example, can destroy a customer experience just as easily as buggy code, and that being able to see these kinds of incidents and formulate a response in one place will be more efficient and useful. They also believe that administrators will be able to troubleshoot any issues proactively that might be about to wreak havoc with their apps.

The companies said the Splunk App for New Relic is now available as a preview on Splunkbase. The app will allow developers and IT operators to get more involved with addressing issues around customer experience.

“New Relic’s agent data provides visibility into the dependencies across customer experience to application code to infrastructure,” said Jim Gochee, New Relic’s chief product officer. “When combined with machine data from Splunk, our joint customers will be able to troubleshoot and innovate faster.”

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