What is Splunk?

Splunk is the engine for machine data. You use Splunk to collect, index and harness the fast moving machine data generated by all your applications, servers and devices — physical, virtual and in the cloud. Splunk allows you you search and analyze all your real-time and historical data from one place.

Splunking your machine data lets you troubleshoot problems and investigate security incidents in minutes, not hours or days. Monitor your end-to-end infrastructure to avoid service degradation or outages. Meet compliance mandates at lower cost. Correlate and analyze complex events spanning multiple systems. Gain new levels of operational visibility and intelligence for IT and the Business.

Index Any Data from Any Source

Splunk indexes any kind of machine data from any source in real time. Point your servers’ or network devices’ syslog at Splunk, monitor live logs, enable change monitoring on your filesystem or collect system metrics. No matter how you get the data, or what format it’s in, it’s indexed the same way – without any specific parsers or connectors to write or maintain. Splunk will store both the raw data and the rich index in an efficient, compressed, filesystem-based datastore, with optional data signing and auditing to prove data integrity.

What is Operational Intelligence?

The IT systems and infrastructure that run your business generate massive volumes of data every millisecond of every day. This machine data contains a definitive record of all user transactions, customer behavior, machine behavior, security threats, fraudulent activity and more. It’s also dynamic, unstructured and non-standard and makes up the majority of the data in your organization.

Machine data is an incredibly valuable resource, but organizations rarely get the value they need from it. Existing data analysis, management and monitoring solutions are simply not engineered for this type of high-volume, variable and dynamic data.

Splunk was developed to solve the machine data challenge. It collects, indexes and harnesses any machine data generated by your IT infrastructure – whether physical, virtual or in the cloud. Splunk delivers new levels of visibility and insight for IT and the business. This is called Operational Intelligence.

What’s Different about Machine Data?

Machine data is continuously generated by the systems and infrastructure that run a business – whether they’re physical, virtual or in the cloud. This data is time-series based, unstructured and non-standard. Yet it holds a definitive record of all your user transactions, customer behavior, system behavior, security threats, fraudulent activity and much more.

IT infrastructure servers and devices can generate terabytes of machine data per day.  Making use of this data requires a solution that understands this data. One that can collect, index and harness massively diverse and dynamic data types, without limits.

A single solution for Operational Intelligence

Here’s how using Splunk and your machine data can drive significant benefits for your organization.

Search and Investigation

Using Splunk, organizations identify and resolve issues up to 70% faster and reduce costly escalations by up to 90%. Splunk is one place to find and fix problems, and investigate incidents across all your IT systems and infrastructure – your applications, websites, servers, networks, virtual machines, security devices, and more. This alone eliminates much of the “human latency” experienced in the trenches.

Proactive Monitoring

Monitor your IT systems and infrastructure in real time to identify issues, problems and attacks before they impact your customers, services and revenue. Splunk keeps watch of specific patterns, trends and thresholds in your machine data so you don’t have to. Trigger notifications in real-time via email or RSS, execute a script to take remedial actions or generate a service desk ticket.

Operational Visibility

See the whole picture, track performance and make better decisions. Visualize usage trends to better plan for capacity; spot SLA infractions, track how you are being measured by the business. Do all of this using your existing machine data without spending millions of dollars instrumenting your IT infrastructure.

Real-time Business Insight

Make better-informed business decisions by understanding trends, patterns and gaining Operational Intelligence from your machine data. See the success of new online services by channel or demographic, reconcile 3rd-party service provider fees against actual use, find your heaviest users and heaviest abusers, and more. Because machine data captures every behavior, the possibilities are game changing. You’ll find the lead times to get to this intelligence dramatically less than other solutions – measured in hours instead of months.