Splunk Debuts Monitoring App for AWS Clouds

Many of the IT organizations that make use of a public cloud service such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) consist of small teams that don’t have much of an IT budget. Today at an AWS Summit event, Splunk announced it will make it less expensive for IT teams to monitor AWS by launching a Splunk Insights for AWS Cloud Monitoring application that can be licensed for $7,500 per year.

Rick Fitz, senior vice president for IT markets at Splunk, says Splunk Insights for AWS Cloud Monitoring is a full instance of Splunk that comes in the form of an application that runs on an AMI virtual machine optimized on an AWS cloud. That application is not only able to capture all the alerts and alarms generated by AWS, Fitz says, but IT teams will be able to model various what-if scenarios as well.

“It can ingest billing information,” says Fitz.

That is significant, says Fitz, because AWS is continually changing prices across a broad range of services. That capability combined with traditional monitoring tools will enable IT teams to continuously optimize their AWS environment, which is something that can’t be done within the limitations of an on-premises environment, says Fitz.

Fitz says Splunk Insights for AWS Cloud Monitoring can also be downloaded by any organization that already has a Splunk Enterprise license. In the future, Splunk will build similar applications for other cloud services based on the feedback it gets from customers.

In the meantime, IT organizations would do well to consider continually managing public cloud costs down as now being one of their core missions. Thanks to all the application programming interfaces (APIs) exposed by cloud service providers, the cranks needed to tune a cloud are already there. What are often missing are the knobs in the form of an application that makes them easy to turn.