Splunk Launches Free App for Real-Time Wire Data Capture

Operational intelligence software provider Splunk has introduced a new application that is designed to help enterprises capture real-time streaming wire data.

Wire data is transmitted between applications and can provide useful information on security and IT infrastructure issues, app performance, and business activity. By capturing this data in real time, organizations using Splunk Enterprise and Splunk Cloud can gain insight for fraud detection, security vulnerabilities, compliance,  operational issues, application management, infrastructure relationships, customer behavior, system downtime and business analytics.

Splunk App for Stream is the first product delivered by the company following last year’s acquisition of Cloudmeter, which specializes in network data capture technologies.

The application is easy to deploy and it’s capable of collecting, aggregating and filtering wire data not only from network endpoints (e.g. virtual machines in public clouds), but also from the network perimeter (e.g. switches and firewalls), Splunk said. By leveraging the app’s filters and aggregation rules, enterprises can control data volumes to ensure that only relevant wire data is captured.

“Unlike traditional and appliance-based solutions, which are difficult to deploy, especially in public cloud infrastructures, the Splunk App for Stream enables customers to gain immediate wire data access on-premises or in public, private or hybrid cloud infrastructures,” commented Leena Joshi, senior director of solutions marketing at Splunk. “It opens up for our customers a whole new class of data sets to provide continuous IT, security and business insights.”

In a security use case, the new app is useful for in-depth monitoring and real-time correlation to drive analytics on threat detection and prevention, data breaches, and intelligence gathering. Moreover, the app can help organizations investigate breaches and other incidents by providing insight into network traffic from affected systems, even if they had not been monitored previously, Splunk said.

“The Splunk App for Stream is a valuable new extension to the Splunk software platform,” said Peter Christy, research director at 451 Research. “The in-depth analysis of wire data given Splunk’s proven scalability and powerful analytics could be a game-changer for the IT industry.”

Splunk App for Stream is available immediately and it’s free for Splunk Enterprise and Splunk Cloud customers. The application can be downloaded from the Splunk Apps website.