Splunk, a San Francisco, California-based provider of software that helps organizations gather and make use of machine data from a diverse set of sources, has released a new version of its flagship platform for machine data, Splunk Enterprise.
Available as software or as a cloud-based service, Splunk Enterprise 6.1 brings enhanced interactive analytics, continuous availability of mission-critical machine data and extends operational intelligence to all users across an organization, the company said.
“Splunk Enterprise 6.1 adds important new capabilities for supporting high availability of mission-critical machine data analytics, embedding operational insights into other business applications and enabling powerful interactive data visualization and exploration,” said Guido Schroeder, senior vice president of products, Splunk. “Splunk’s clustering supports deployments that span multiple sites, an important requirement for globally operating enterprises, and we have further expanded our interactive visualization and information delivery features to provide machine data insights to broader audiences.”
Key features and updates in Splunk Enterprise 6.1 include:
• Multi-site Clustering: Delivers continuous availability for Splunk Enterprise deployments that span multiple sites, countries or continents by replicating raw and indexed data in a clustered configuration.
• Search Affinity: Provides a performance increase when using multi-site clustering by routing search and analytics requests to the nearest cluster, increasing performance and decreasing network usage.
• zLinux Forwarder: Allows for application and platform data from IBM mainframes to be easily collected and indexed by Splunk Enterprise.
• Data Preview with Structured Inputs: Enables previewing of massive data files to verify alignment of fields and headers before indexing to improve data quality and the time it takes to discover critical insights.
• Embedded Reports: Enable any Splunk report or table to be embedded in third-party business applications such as salesforce.com, WordPress, Wiki, Microsoft SharePoint and more.
• Custom Alerts: Deliver alerts with embedded machine data context, thereby reducing mean-time-to-resolution (MTTR) and providing the ability to customize alert templates.
• Enhanced Dashboard Editor: Build advanced dashboards through the UI and without requiring advanced XML coding.
• Chart Overlay: Improves data analysis by providing the ability to overlay one chart on top of another.
• Contextual Drilldown: Enables more detailed insights when clicking on a dashboard panel without leaving the context of the dashboard itself.
• Pan-and-Zoom Controls: Enables more focused analytics by enabling a range of interest on a chart and zoom in for deeper analysis.
“Splunk is aiming high with the new release delivering resiliency with multi-site clustering, enabling access to mainframe data, more contextual alerting mechanisms and embeddable reports into business apps like Salesforce and Microsoft® SharePoint,” said Michael Coté, research director of Infrastructure Software, 451 Research.