Splunk: Analyzing Machine Data

Doug Merritt, President & CEO

Even though artificial intelligence is considered a technology at its nascent stage, it has brought a multitude of benefits to businesses in many ways. Today, as organizations are leveraging both big data and machine learning to streamline IT operations, artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps) is emerging as a one-stop solution. With AI, enterprises can utilize the wealth of its data and obtain actionable insights to manage the humongous streams of machine-generated big data. While most IT organizations would agree that managing and accessing unstructured data provides great benefits, they would also say that extracting useful insights often becomes a daunting task for them. This is where Splunk comes in. The firm leverages artificial intelligence to make sense of data and assists its clients to streamline the business process.

A Guide to Operational Intelligence

Splunk was launched in 2004, with a vision to make machine data accessible, usable, and valuable to everyone, and help them garner useful insights out of it. Today, machine data has witnessed a profound growth in the IT operations. It holds a prominent value as it contains a definitive record of all customer behavior, sensor activity, user transactions, fraudulent activity, machine behavior, security threats, and much more. Though machine data brings forth a gamut of benefits, gaining valuable insights from the data often becomes a significant challenge for enterprises. To address this problem, the firm brings forth its platform—Splunk Enterprise for the clients. The platform assists organizations to monitor and deliver operational intelligence to upscale IT, security, and business performance. It delivers end-to-end visibility and insights for several IT operations and empowers enterprises to address the challenges and opportunities of managing massive streams of machine-generated big data.

Splunk has witnessed a profound growth through continually making machine data accessible, usable, and making it valuable for all its clients

Apart from converting all the machine data into Operational Intelligence, organizations can also bolster the IT operations and infrastructure to gain real-time visibility into the entire application stack.

With Operational Intelligence, enterprises get a real-time view of what is happening in their IT systems and technology infrastructure. It helps companies make the best-informed decisions and acquire valuable insights out of data.

Splunk IT Service Intelligence

Since its genesis, Splunk has assisted more than three-quarter of the Fortune 100 companies and has empowered thousands of enterprises, universities, government agencies, and service providers. With proven solutions from Splunk, enterprises have gained benefits of obtaining machine data for application management, IT operations, security, web intelligence, customer and business analytics, and more. The firm provides Splunk IT Service Intelligence (ITSI), a monitoring and analytics solution powered by AIOps, to improve the visibility into the health and key performance indicators (KPI) of critical IT and business operations. With this offering, Splunk’s clients can address a variety of IT challenges including deriving service-level insights and analysis on events and metrics. Splunk ITSI enables companies to aggregate data along with abating IT silos. Built on the Splunk Operational Intelligence platform, ITSI leverages search and correlation capabilities to assist companies in monitoring, collecting, and reporting from IT devices, systems, and applications. The solution uses machine learning algorithms to adapt to the thresholds in real-time and improve service operations, team productivity, and cross-functional collaboration of its clients.

An Exemplary to Address Problems at Hand

Since its genesis, the firm has assisted over 14,000 customers based in 110 countries to abate operations costs, improve service levels, mitigate security risks, enable compliance, enhance DevOps collaboration and create new products and service offerings. The firm’s extensive clients’ base includes some of the prominent market leaders including Zillow, Coca-Cola, Adobe, Atlassian, and AURIZON. In one of its successful projects, Splunk assisted Vodafone, to monitor all of their operations in real time. The challenge was that the telecom firm lagged visibility for monitoring the performance of its services that were getting rolled out every day by the projects teams, designers, and architects. With ITSI, the client was able to garner real-time insights to support, troubleshoot, and monitor services. Since deploying ITSI, the telecom giant attained many benefits such as promptly addressing the issues and improving its operational visibility. The solution, implemented in two days, enabled Vodafone to proactively resolve issues with the underlying data from various KPIs indexed in the Splunk platform. As the association empowered Vodafone to accelerate its service insights, the company intends to employ Splunk IT Service Intelligence into its other services as well.

"Splunk assists enterprises to address the challenges and opportunities of managing massive streams of machine-generated big data"

Over the years, Splunk has witnessed a profound growth through continually making machine data accessible, usable, and making it valuable for all its clients along with empowering them to attain optimal levels of Operational Intelligence. Going ahead, the firm intends to further expanding its incidents detection capability and improve monitoring of emerging external threats in the organization. In this context, the company offers ‘Recorded Future,' a real-time threat intelligence product powered by Machine Learning. With this offering, enterprises can deliver threat intelligence in real-time and capture threat context for all the future incidents.

- Rohit Chowdhary
November 03, 2017