Advanced Computing in the Age of AI | Friday, March 29, 2024

Splunk Beefs Up Cloud Monitoring Tool 

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As enterprises accelerate the shift to a hybrid private/public cloud model, a growing list of data analytics vendors are stepping up to offer cloud monitoring and other tools designed to ease cloud migrations that are expected to consume the lion's share of IT budgets over the next year and a half.

Among them is Splunk Inc., which this week rolled out a cloud-monitoring tool specifically geared to tracking workloads running on Amazon Web Services (NASDAQ: AMZN) public clouds. The analytics tool is designed to increase visibility into AWS infrastructure to track cloud usage and fine tune cloud infrastructure while gauging workload performance and application availability.

Cloud users "need the ability to correlate data sources across environments, in real time to derive maximum value," Rick Fitz, Splunk's senior vice president of IT markets, noted in a statement.

San Francisco-based Splunk (NASDAQ: SPLK), is among a growing number of cloud analytics vendors providing application and workload monitoring tools as more companies embrace hybrid cloud deployments and shift sensitive workloads to AWS and other public clouds.

Other entrants in the cloud-monitoring arena include software asset management specialists such as Flexera Software, which launched a public cloud-monitoring tool last year, and newcomers such as Wavefront, which is developing tools that help software-as-a-service vendors improve their DevOps functions. As of last fall, the cloud monitoring startup had raised $52 million in venture capital.

Meanwhile, Flexera's monitoring tool initially targeted AWS with plans to extend the services to Google Cloud (NASDAQ: GOOGL) and Microsoft Azure (NASDAQ: MSFT) and other public cloud platforms.

Splunk said Monday (Aug. 14) its monitoring tool could be used to correlate AWS cloud data with other sources and across hybrid platforms using visualizations and pre-built dashboards.

This and other cloud analytics tools respond to a steady enterprise shift to public clouds, including "a potential consolidation of cloud providers or solutions," according to a recent cloud security report released by Intel's McAfee cyber security unit.

The study found that the average number of cloud services used by respondents to its survey declined from 43 in 2015 to 29 last year. "Cloud architectures also changed significantly, from predominantly private-only in 2015 to increased adoption of public cloud resulting in a predominantly hybrid private/public infrastructure in 2016," McAfee reported.

Those trends are attracting data analytics vendors such as Splunk that specialize in parsing machine data to provide intelligence about IT operations.

Splunk said its Insights for AWS Cloud Monitoring tool runs with several AWS tools, and is available only under license on an annual basis with pricing starting at $7,500 per year. A 30-day free trial is available on the AWS Marketplace.

About the author: George Leopold

George Leopold has written about science and technology for more than 30 years, focusing on electronics and aerospace technology. He previously served as executive editor of Electronic Engineering Times. Leopold is the author of "Calculated Risk: The Supersonic Life and Times of Gus Grissom" (Purdue University Press, 2016).

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