As network and server processors offer increasing levels of data speed, they also offer the opportunity to process wire data that flows between applications for analysis.
The latest vendor to provide a way to get at this data is Splunk Inc. which on Monday released App for Stream, a free wire data monitoring plug-in for customers using the Splunk Enterprise and Splunk Cloud network data monitoring solutions.
It can be downloaded from the Splunk Apps Web page.
The app is the first product from Splunk’s 2013 acquisition of Cloudmeter, Leena Joshi, the company’s senior director of solutions marketing, said in a release. “Unlike traditional and appliance-based solutions, which are difficult to deploy, especially in public cloud infrastructures, the Splunk App for Stream enables customers to gain immediate wire data access on-premises or in public, private or hybrid cloud infrastructures. It opens up for our customers a whole new class of data sets to provide continuous IT, security and business insights.”
The app collects, aggregates and filters wire data from both network endpoints, such as virtual machines in public clouds or virtual desktops, and the network perimeter, such as routers, switches and firewalls. Administrators can control data volumes to capture only the wire data that is needed. By correlating wire data with other machine data, such as logs, events and metrics, IT departments can gain new insights into application and infrastructure performance, operational issues, transaction paths, system downtime, infrastructure relationships, security vulnerabilities, compliance and customer behavior, the company says.
It gives the following use cases:
— Provides granular data on transaction response times, transaction traces, transaction paths, network performance and database queries without requiring any instrumentation of the application;
— Lets administrators to pinpoint root-cause of issues faster, map dependencies of critical infrastructure services and ensure the delivery of services at the levels required by the business;
— Enables in-depth monitoring and real-time correlation to drive sophisticated analytics on breaches, threat detection, intelligence gathering and threat prevention. Can be deployed in the midst of a breach/incident investigation to gain insight into network traffic from any system of interest not previously monitored;
— Captures Web interactions and key metrics such as time spent on page, bounce rates, navigation paths and product performance, without the need to tag individual pages. Improves customer satisfaction and conversions, prevents drop-offs and can boost online revenues. Enables real time end-to-end insights into business processes such as order management, provisioning, trade execution span and others, without requiring specific instrumentation.