Splunk rolls out cloud updates, new machine learning capabilities | ZDNet
by Stephanie CondonOther updates the Splunk platform include improvements in mobile device management and in real-time stream processing
Splunk on Wednesday announced improvements to its cloud and machine learning capabilities, as well as other updates to the core Splunk platform, including improvements to its real-time stream processing. The updates largely focus on providing customers with a more unified way of monitoring and managing data.
For Splunk Cloud, the company is rolling out Splunk IT Service Intelligence (ITSI) 4.5, delivering a centralized framework for monitoring and investigation. It provides increased capacity for service and event management to support large deployments.
"Customers are moving from one data center to multiple data centers in the cloud," Splunk's Sendur Sellakumar said to ZDNet. "The complexity is increasing, not decreasing. Our goal is to diminish that complexity significantly."
Splunk recently announced the availability of Splunk Cloud on Google Cloud, better enabling customers to share data between applications and draw insights from data sets pulled from hybrid, multi-cloud environments. Meanwhile, the company reported last week that its cloud revenue was up 81 percent year-over-year in its first quarter, with cloud driving nearly half of its software bookings.
Splunk is also updating its Machine Learning Toolkit (MLTK) with a simplified, customizable interface designed to make the toolkit more accessible to a broader audience. MLTK version 5.2 provides new visualization capabilities, as well as a new family of Smart Assistants offering step-by-step guided workflows.Customers can take their data, select publicly available machine learning algorithms and run models against that data for simple use cases like data clustering, forecasting or outlier detection.
"We're seeing customers use this generalized capability for looking at operational data, marketing data, looking at associations," Sellakumar said.
Meanwhile, the latest version of the Splunk Data Stream Processor (DSP), Splunk's real-time stream processing service, offers more advanced streaming capabilities, as well as the ability to collect data in a single, unified location. DSP 1.1 also lets organizations mask customer or sensitive information on the stream and then route data to different locations within their organization with data guarantees.
Lastly, Splunk is updating Connected Experiences -- a suite of apps that includes Splunk Mobile -- with new support for mobile device management (MDM) providers like MobileIron and AirWatch.