For many IT organizations, having complete end-to-end visibility of their IT assets as well as a comprehensive understanding of integrations, dependencies and changing statuses is an ideal position rather than a reality. This is especially true for organizations with legacy on-premises systems spread across many environments. Those that were cloud native or successfully migrated to the cloud had the privilege of cloud tools to visualize individual environments.

As we at Splunk accelerate our cloud journey, we’re often faced with the decision of when to use logs vs metrics — a decision many in IT face. On the surface, one can do a lot by just observing logs and events. In fact, in the early days of Splunk Cloud, this is exactly how we observed everything. As we continue to grow, however, we find ourselves using a combination of both. This post lays out the overall difference in logs and metrics and when to best utilize each.

If there is one thing organizations can take away from the past few years, it's that they are far more vulnerable than they could realize before. From pandemics to critical supply shortages to widespread data breaches and natural disasters, businesses that don’t have plans in place to handle and respond to emergencies are at tremendous risk. As leaders plan for inevitable crises and disruption, interest in business resilience and continuity grows.

When monitoring your application performance or troubleshooting an issue in production, context is key. The more information available, the faster the prevention of or detection of a user impacting issue. Observability tools offer many different features, like code profiling, to help contextualize your data. In this post, I’ll discuss what code profiling is and show an example of how it works.

Splunk Hunk is the nickname of Splunk Analytics for Hadoop. Hunk is an app available in Splunkbase. It is great for exploring, analyzing and visualizing data in Hadoop and NoSQL data stores. Hunk offers a shortcut around the hard work of inventing and coding every inquiry in Hadoop. Hunk helps to create insights from big data, without the need for specialized skills, fixed schemas, or months of development.

Curious about Splunk® Universal Forwarders? This article will sum up what they are, why to use them and how the universal forwarder works. Importantly, we’ll point you to the very best tips, tricks and resources on using universal forwarders (and other ways) to get data into Splunk.

On November 16, 2022, I sat down with analyst KellyAnn Fitzpatrick from RedMonk to discuss my favorite topic: observability. This time, we looked at observability in a context of what to do and what to avoid doing as you’re starting and going on an observability journey. Click the image below (or here) for a replay of the session. A machine-generated transcript is available at the end of the post.

A hybrid infrastructure brings business benefits but it also brings new challenges. Migrating workloads to the cloud is a complex operation that generates more data than engineering teams can adequately manage. Traditional monitoring tools are limited in helping teams find and fix problems during and after a cloud migration. This can throw business strategies off course, limit customer value and hurt the bottom line.

Resilience has become the new strategic imperative for manufacturers during these testing times. As the world’s challenges make headlines, so do the innovative responses of manufacturing leaders. Savvy manufacturers automate, overhaul fundamental processes, modernize their security posture and reduce their CO2 footprint. Forward-focused organizations double down on their cloud investment to become more agile and resilient. And none of it is possible without data.

Knowing the differences between data warehouses and databases can clear up a lot of confusion for many people, especially with the volume of data we have these days. In this blog post, I'll discuss the differences between these two types of data systems. I'll also provide some examples to help illustrate the points we make. Let's get started! (This article was written by Austin Chia.)