theCUBE Live At Splunk.conf 2014

As more businesses extend reach into the mobile realm, it is becoming ever more important to be able to instrument and gather data from mobile applications. To ease this form of instrumentation, Splunk Inc. announced today the general availability of Splunk MINT Express and Splunk MINT Enterprise (beta).

Splunk MINT Express is a cloud service that can be used to easily instrument any mobile application with a single line of code. Splunk MINT Enterprise keeps the same level of ease for developers and allows direct integration with Splunk Enterprise or Splunk Cloud enabling customers to receive end-to-end visibility and real-time analytics.

As a machine data aggregation system, Splunk is only as strong as the data it can ingest, so the addition of MINT adds an easy way for developers to gather data from mobile apps and ingest it into Splunk.

“Data from mobile apps that provides insights into user behavior and usage characteristics is worth more when combined with data from other channels,” says Guido Schroeder, senior vice president of products at Splunk, ”including  web and laptop applications, to provide full visibility of user interactions across multiple channels.”

Splunk MINT Express

Splink offers MINT Express as a fast path for developers to instrument mobile applications and ingest mobile data into Splunk. With the SDK, available for Android and iOS, developers can introduce a single line of code to applications that will get the job done. Express also provides a cloud-based console for developers to view view performance and usage information.

Tools such as express allow lightweight instrumentation, which is especially useful for developers and DevOps teams working with new applications or for rapid testing purposes.

Splunk MINT Enterprise

The enterprise variation of MINT is currently in beta but delivers a real heavyweight companion for MINT, which combines mobile application data from other Splunk ingested data to provide increased context and insights.

Many businesses already grew up in the web-era of information technology and are now beginning to open up services normally provided on the web to mobile. By combining multiple data sources from web, mobile, server-side, database, network, etc. DevOps teams have a greater visibility of the entire system to better understand bottlenecks, failures, and discover root causes.

The data gained by combining different sources allows the correlation of usage across web, mobile, and other channels to identify business opportunities and usage patterns. How customers approach an application on mobile can differ dramatically from web, having insight into those differences can guide UI design, presentation, and direct decisions on what services to provide on mobile in the future.

For business users, especially those using Splunk Enterprise to visualize usage information, adding mobile presents new insights in real time using a single platform.