Splunk Improves Usability, Scalability, Speed of IT Search Tool

Version 4 also improves manageability.

• 07/21/2009

Splunk today announced Splunk 4, the next generation of IT Search, improving the speed, scale, usability, and manageability of its IT search technology.

Founded by experienced IT pros to overcome the limits presented by manual processes, point solutions, and proprietary technologies, Splunk 4 improves an organization's ability to manage, secure, and audit their entire IT infrastructure. In this re-architected version, Splunk 4 has incorporated a highly customizable user interface that makes Splunk more accessible to a wider range of users, from sys admins to executives. Significant usability enhancements, combined with the Splunk track record of fast deployment, help Splunk 4 users get up and productive quickly to deliver a fast return on their investment.

According to CTO and co-founder Erik Swan, “In Splunk 4, we absorbed extensive feedback from users and re-architected the product to support unlimited scalability, complex Splunk deployments, and an increasingly diverse user base, and created a framework to develop and deploy IT apps that leverage the Splunk engine."

Splunk 4 offers users the ability to create custom dashboards in fewer than five clicks. The release also surpasses the speed of previous releases with up to 10x faster search and 2x faster indexing, radically enhancing IT issue resolution times and incident investigations, giving users the power to index terabytes per day and search on massive amounts of IT data to deliver results in seconds on low-cost commodity server hardware.

Given that customer needs are diverse and constantly changing, users of version 4 can easily develop and deploy IT apps running on the Splunk engine. In addition, an increasingly broad set of apps are becoming available for use from Splunk and its partners; examples include Enterprise Security, PCI Compliance, and Change Management from Splunk, and partner apps for use with F5, VMware, and BlueCoat. These IT apps expand the utility and value the Splunk engine delivers. In addition, with Splunk 4, users can easily navigate from one installed App to another, for instance, while managing a security incident a user can move from the Enterprise Security Suite App to the Change Management App to see if a configuration change has impacted an investigation, saving them valuable time.

In all, the release includes over 1,800 enhancements and more than 50 features are included in Splunk 4. These enhancements cover four key areas:

• Enterprise speed and scale: Splunk 4 is the industry’s highest performance search engine for unstructured IT data and based on a MapReduce implementation.

• Enterprise-wide usability: Splunk 4 has new features, such as a new Search Assistant and a Getting Started app, to reduce the learning time for novice users.

• Enterprise management: Splunk 4 offers enterprise-grade manageability for customers having single Splunk servers or complex geographically distributed implementations with thousands of Splunk servers and forwarders. Administrators can use Splunk Manager to administer their Splunk installations centrally and delegate management of Splunk to departments and users. In addition, Splunk Manager provides more comprehensive role-based access controls. Permissions can be set to restrict user access to specific data sources, apps, dashboards, management configurations, and other system parameters.

• From Search Engine to IT App Engine: Splunk 4 apps can be seen at: www.splunk.com/apps, where customers can browse and download Splunk apps and updates, including partner apps, free Splunk apps, Splunk solutions trials, and community apps. Splunk users can also browse apps from the product itself, using the new Splunk Launcher interface.

Splunk 4 is available immediately. Pricing starts at $7,500 USD. Free trial downloads are also available immediately. More information is available at www.splunk.com/download.