Splunk Eases Microsoft Exchange Management

Transforming IT from a Department of ‘No’ to a Business Enabler

In terms of the pantheon of enterprise products that are difficult to manage, there is no doubt that Microsoft Exchange would be at or near the top of the list.

Looking to reduce that complexity, Splunk at the Microsoft Exchange 2014 conference today launched a version 3.0 update to its Splunk App for Microsoft Exchange offering that makes it easier to figure out whether an issue is a Microsoft Exchange, Active Directory or Windows problem.

Via an enhanced set of dashboards, Leena Joshi, senior director of infrastructure operations marketing for Splunk, says IT organizations can now apply Splunk analytics tools at a more granular level to gain more visibility into usage and behavior to make better capacity planning decisions. Previously, Splunk supported Microsoft Exchange, but the upgrade makes it simpler to correlate events that are occurring across Microsoft Exchange, Active Directory and Windows, any one of which, Joshi notes, could be affecting the overall Microsoft Exchange environment.

In recent years, Splunk has emerged as one of the leading tools for analyzing the mountains of machine data that gets generated by IT systems and applications. After all, when it comes to figuring out what’s wrong with any particular IT product or service, there is usually no shortage of data. The hard part is trying to make sense of it all.

Of course, the complexity of Microsoft Exchange is one of the primary reasons that many organizations are moving to Microsoft Office365 in the cloud, which Joshi says Splunk is mulling whether to support. In the meantime, all the IT organizations that will be supporting Microsoft Exchange on premise for many years to come might want to consider how to make that a significantly less painful experience for all concerned.