As a tool for delving into the deepest and sometimes darkest elements of IT logs, the machine learning and search engine technology that Splunk created has been widely adopted. This week at the Splunk 2015 User Conference, the company revealed how it intends to make that technology more accessible to more IT organizations.
Splunk IT Service Intelligence is an IT management application that sits on top of the core Splunk platform. Jon Rooney, director of IT operations marketing for Splunk, says the company developed Splunk IT Service Intelligence after observing how IT operations teams were deploying Splunk. Rather than continuing to ask those IT organizations to develop their own applications on top of Splunk, Rooney says the development of Splunk 6.0 put all the elements in place to develop a commercial application.
In addition to launching Splunk IT Service Intelligence this week, Splunk announced that the latest release now requires half as much IT infrastructure to deploy than previous versions. It also includes a new HTTP event collector that uses standard APIs to let applications and devices feed millions of events per second into Splunk.
Splunk and tools like it have proven invaluable over the years for IT organizations that are trying to figure out such things as the source of application performance issues or security breaches. The challenge has been the fact that even after Splunk was deployed, IT organizations still had to either feed that data into an existing management framework or build one themselves on top of Splunk.
With the launch of Splunk IT Service Intelligence, the company is not only providing another option, it is also signaling that it intends to compete across the entire IT application management category.