theCUBE Live At Splunk.conf 2014

Splunk Inc. announced today the release of the newest version of its real-time operational intelligence platform Splunk Enterprise 6.2, which comes with a number improvements that enhance enterprise-level capabilities. Splunk Enterprise 6.2 focuses on scalability and stability, with marked increases over previous versions, as well as greater accessibility for business users.

This release shows a marked interest by Splunk in broadening the audience for its product and reach into the enterprise market space. Splunk Enterprise 6.2 focuses on not just stability and uptime, but also scalability in both the number of nodes and the number of concurrent users that can use the system at once.

Splunk Enterprise 6.2 includes a number of key features that increase its reach and usefulness for non-technical business users as well as features that enhance DevOps capabilities.

Business users a focus of the Splunk platform

In the enterprise environment, engineers aren’t the only people who need to peruse information gathered by analytics systems. Splunk has added a new intuitive wizard for onboarding machine data (from a multitude of sources) as well as new interfaces to guide users through previewing, onboarding, and preparing information for downstream analysis.

“Splunk Enterprise 6.2 gives easier, more intuitive analysis to casual and less technical users, through automated discovery of valuable patterns in the machine data,” says Guido Schroeder, senior vice president of products at Splunk.

To facilitate easy ingestion of data, a new tool, the Advanced Field Extractor, delivers simplified identification, naming and tagging of fields in machine data for rapid analysis.

On the analytics dashboard side, Splunk Enterprise 6.2 adds several new tools that open up easier visualization and analysis modules for non-technical users. While Splunk comes with a powerful programming language, not all users have the technical savvy to put it to use, as a result Splunk has added Instant Pivot. This tool allows anyone to pivot directly from any search and create dashboards and visualization that cross-references multiple sources of data without needing to program.

Business users can also take advantage of the Event Pattern Detection system that draws out meaningful patterns from machine data and turns them into alerts.

Finally, the dashboard has been revamped to make it much easier for non-technical users to package searches, create prebuilt visualizations, and share them.

DevOps and engineers not left behind

Splunk Enterprise 6.2 adds a simplified management system for scale, continuing this version’s attention to scalability.

The management system eliminates shared storage requirements and adds enhancements to search head clustering. This enhancement increases the concurrent user capability (noted above) and improves redundancy and and replication of search results. This means that Splunk’s system will work faster and remain more stable–taking some weight off the shoulders of the operations team.

For distributed Splunk Enterprise deployments a new interface has been added, the Distributed Management Console, that allows engineers to centrally monitor the health and performance of distributed deployments.

Spunk Enterprise 6.2 is available for download starting at 5 a.m. PT, Tuesday, October 28 on the Splunk website. Users interested in demoing the product will be able to sign up the Splunk Online Sandbox for a free private workspace in the cloud.