Splunk, the leading software platform for real-time operational intelligence, announced the general availability of Splunk Enterprise 6, the latest version of the company’s award-winning platform for machine data.
Splunk Enterprise 6 delivers powerful and fast analytics, up to 1 000 times faster than previous versions, and patent-pending technology designed to quickly unlock the value of machine data to IT and business users alike.
“Too many organisations are still struggling with a data divide between IT and the business,” says Splunk chairman and CEO Godfrey Sullivan.
“At Splunk, we understand that the most successful organisations in the world give equal access to the data, regardless of skill level, to drive smart decisions that have true business impact.
“This is what inspired our product team to build Splunk Enterprise 6. We believe that everyone in the organisation, from the system administrator to the C-level executive, should be empowered to find that ‘aha’ moment. Splunk Enterprise 6 bridges the data divide and unifies IT and business users around the tremendous value and ROI to be found in machine data.”
“Splunk Enterprise 6 is the platform for machine data for everyone, with powerful analytics and performance that unlock machine data insights to an entirely new set of users,” says Guido Schroeder, senior VP of products, Splunk.
“With an enhanced user experience, simple management of enterprise deployments and a rich developer environment, Splunk Enterprise 6 gives technical users the ability to define the meaningful relationships in the underlying data, enabling business users and analysts to easily manipulate and visualise data in a simple drag-and-drop interface. All of this, with amazing performance on low-cost commodity hardware.”
“Splunk Enterprise 6 signals a major evolution to the Splunk story, one that could introduce the platform to a new set of users,” says Eric Hanselman, chief analyst of 451 Research.
“Business users want and need to use software that makes it easier to dig deeper into analytic tasks without the help of IT or knowledge of coding and query languages. Those who’ve been using the Splunk product for years will benefit from usability and management enhancements that will make their Splunk lives easier and more productive.
“By providing machine data analytics to a new set of users and an improved user experience, Splunk Enterprise 6 has value for both audiences.”
More than 350 customers and partners participated in the Splunk Enterprise 6 beta program. The response to new analytics features including, among others, data models and pivot has been overwhelmingly positive.
“At PostFinance, exceptional customer service has kept us in business for over 100 years. Splunk Enterprise gives us insights from our data that help us deliver a great online experience,” says Roger Bigler, team leader for Splunk, PostFinance.
“Splunk Enterprise 6 provides a more powerful yet incredibly easy-to-use way to interact with and visualise machine-generated business data so we can share consistent views of the data, increasing the speed with which we deliver service to our customers.”
“Security analysts at Oak Ridge National Laboratory utilise Splunk Enterprise to analyse large volumes of diverse machine data streaming in realtime,” says Jesse Trucks, cyber security engineer, Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
“It is vital these analysts be able to directly manipulate and interact with the data to quickly obtain operational security intelligence. Splunk Enterprise 6 will enable many more analysts to discover patterns and generate information from our data with the new visualisation capabilities.”
“The core value of Splunk Enterprise 6 goes beyond our IT engineers. It presents a significant opportunity for business users and developers to eliminate their fear of data,” says Chulhyun Cho, e-commerce development team leader, CJ O Shopping.
“We expect a dramatic increase in the number of business users that will use the platform thanks to the new analytics features. For advanced Splunk users, pivot powered by data models makes it incredibly easy to build dynamic dashboards and fluid visualisations, which means our analysts can manipulate any data they want to analyse.
“Splunk Enterprise 6 is also very attractive to developers because it makes it easier to build insightful visualisations for our internal users.”
Splunk Enterprise 6 introduces three innovations that make analytics dramatically faster and easier for existing users.
These breakthroughs also open up the value of gaining insights from machine data to an entirely new audience of business users:
* Pivot opens up the power of analytics to non-technical business users and analysts with a simple drag-and-drop interface to explore, manipulate and visualise data. This includes the ability to click and drag pre-built visualisations and quickly build complex queries and reports without learning a query language.
* Data Models provide for a more meaningful representation of underlying machine data and a deeper understanding of relationships in the data, making this data more useful to a broader base of users.
* High Performance Analytics Store is a patent-pending transparent acceleration technology that delivers analytics performance up to 1 000 times faster than any previous version of Splunk Enterprise.
Splunk Enterprise 6 includes powerful productivity features for users with a completely redesigned user experience that delivers simpler, more intuitive actions. The new home experience is easy to personalise and gives users instant access to the data, apps and content they care about.
An enhanced search experience brings search and reporting together so users can author rich, dynamic reports and build visualisations, tables and custom searches faster than ever before.
Splunk Enterprise 6 is easier to deploy, configure and manage, even as customers scale out their mission-critical Splunk Enterprise deployments. It also adds a more powerful developer environment with an integrated Web framework:
* Simplified Cluster Management delivers easier management of mission-critical Splunk software deployments by monitoring high availability, automating search workloads and making it easier to deploy apps. Everything the Splunk admin needs to know can be monitored on a centralised dashboard.
* Forwarder Management supports big data scale with easy configuration and visual management of thousands of forwarder configurations across multiple geographies.
* Enhanced Dashboard Editing lets users build interactive dashboards and user workflows without writing advanced code and enables one-click access to develop in the Splunk Web framework.
* The Integrated Web Framework enables developers to quickly and efficiently build custom Splunk apps, customise dashboards or add advanced functionality using standard Web technologies such as JavaScript and Django.