Splunk updates Observability Cloud, rolls out edge data stream processor

San Francisco-headquartered Splunk, which provides enterprises with a unified security and observability platform, today announced incremental updates to its core offering. The release, focusing on Splunk Observability Cloud and Mission Control, marks another step toward unifying and modernizing enterprise workflows, enabling customers to go from visibility to action as soon as possible.

Also available is a Splunk edge data stream processor for enterprise teams looking to better distribute analytics between cloud and edge locations.

Looking at Observability Cloud

A significant part of Splunk, Observability Cloud provides enterprises visibility into infrastructure, application, IT service and user experience performance. It also provides the data required for troubleshooting and remediation with incident intelligence. The company claims that the offering takes less than two minutes to identify incidents, reducing the average time spent per incident by about 26% for enterprises.

With the latest update, Splunk is adding two new Observability Cloud products to help teams troubleshoot faster with increased visibility: Trace Analyzer and Network Explorer. 

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Trace Analyzer, a part of Splunk application performance monitoring, lets users search traces generated by their application, and identify patterns in the full-fidelity trace data. It uses machine learning to reduce manual effort and improves the accuracy of alerts, the company claims. 

Network Explorer joins the infrastructure monitoring part of Observability Cloud. It enables teams to monitor the health of their cloud network and resolve issues more quickly.

Security and edge data stream processor

On the security front, Splunk Mission Control, a cloud-based security operations console that lets teams triage, investigate and respond to incidents with Splunk security technologies, is becoming more unified and simplified. 

According to the company, unlike previous versions, Mission Control will be deployable as a Splunk application to allow enterprises to easily unify operations across security information and event management (SIEM); security orchestration, automation and response (SOAR); and threat intelligence capabilities. The console is getting deeper integration with SOAR capabilities, allowing users to launch automation playbooks to investigate and respond to security threats in seconds.

According to Duncan Brown, IDC group’s VP of European software research, these innovations in unified security and observability aid organizations in driving digital transformation amid growing cyberattacks, by increasing digital resilience through advanced security analytics and better visibility across the tech stack.

“A holistic approach to security and observability is essential for any digital enterprise,” Brown added.

Notably, as part of the latest release, Splunk has also made its edge processor, a data stream processing solution that works at the edge of the network, generally available.

The offering provides Splunk platform customers with increased visibility into and control over streaming data before it is routed from the network to external environments. This way, teams can easily filter, mask and transform data close to its source.

Splunk’s unified offering competes with platforms including Datadog, Dynatrace, Logicmonitor, New Relic and Coralogix.