Splunk’s new App for Stream will give IT departments more insight into their infrastructures by collecting network traffic on response times, network performance and database queries.
The goal with App for Stream is to expand on what organizations can learn from data collected and analyzed using its existing enterprise and cloud products. The app offers a software approach for capturing network traffic, or what Splunk calls wire data, which makes it easier to monitor public clouds in particular than when using hardware appliances.
The expansion hasn’t happened overnight—to increase the usefulness of its platform Splunk bought Cloudmeter in December last year. By acquiring the company, Splunk got a “strong technical team with deep networking expertise,” it said at the time. App for Stream is the first result of the deal, Splunk said Tuesday.
The app can be used to capture network traffic between both on-premises systems and public, private or hybrid cloud infrastructures. To help with customization, users can define filters and aggregation rules to capture the data they find most meaningful.
Splunk has high hopes for how enterprises will use App for Stream. It can help improve application uptime by keeping an extra eye on response time and network performance, as well as help with infrastructure operations by finding the root cause of issues faster, the company said. It can also help with business analytics by capturing Web interactions and help monitor potential hacker attacks, according to Splunk.
The Splunk App for Stream is free for enterprise and cloud users, and can be downloaded from the company’s website. All instances of the software must run Splunk Enterprise v6.0 or later.
To help users get started, Splunk is also offering the Stream Examples app, which includes sample applications, dashboards and searches with examples of how to use collected data.