Splunk, Inc. today announced the general availability of the Splunk App for Stream—a new software-based approach to capturing real-time streaming wire data directly from the network.

Wire data is information captured by the network as sent by applications. Splunk App for Stream can be deployed into the cloud or attached to virtual machines, making it useful for times when DevOps teams often must export logs from for later analysis.

The Splunk App for Stream can be rapidly deployed to collect, aggregate and filter wire data from both endpoints – such as virtual machines in public clouds or virtual desktops –  as well as network perimeter devices like routers, switches and firewalls. The App for Stream also directly integrates with Spunk Enterprise, the company’s popular analytics suite.

“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,” said Leena Joshi, senior director of solutions marketing at Splunk.

App for Stream is the first product release delivered from the acquisition of Cloudmeter by Splunk last year. Cloudmeter develops applications that allow IT operations teams to transform real-time captured network data into actionable information.

For DevOps

DevOps teams struggle constantly with numerous sources of data — apps, firewalls, routers, VMs, platforms all produce logs — but sometimes it’s equally important to pull data “unbiased” by an application writer’s expectations of what data needs to be logged. With App for Stream, Splunk users can decide exactly what data to record as it’s sent from apps through the network.

Fine-grained filters enable users to dynamically control data volumes and capture only the wire data that is relevant for the needs of their specific analysis.

As a result, application management can be enhanced with granular data on response times, transaction traces, transaction paths, network performance and database queries without requiring instrumentation of the application.

Operations administrators can use wire data to pinpoint the root-cause of issues faster through quicker mapping of dependencies of critical infrastructure that reveal bottlenecks in networking, cloud platform and app communications. Operations already depends heavily on real-time updates concerning the current health of the network and App for Stream adds this for the application layer.

The Splunk App for Stream is available for free from the Splunk Apps website.