Over the last couple of years, there has been exponential growth in the volume and variety of machine data. The main reason has been the ever-growing number of connected machines in IT infrastructure, the sophistication of data algorithms, and the increased use of IoT devices. This data has proven to be quite valuable - even necessary - as an organisation can analyse and use it to drive productivity, improve efficiency, and gain visibility for their business.

There is a catch: to make the machine data work for them, organisations need a simplified tool that can analyse and visualise. This is where Splunk comes in.

Splunk is a software platform organisations can use to monitor, analyse, search, and visualise machine data in real-time. The platform is most popularly used to capture, index, and correlate machine data in a searchable container. The output is perspicuous information in human-digestible formats such as reports, graphs, visualisations, dashboards, or alerts.

Splunk has many tools and features that make it practical for an organisation to use machine data. It is best suited for root cause analysis, diagnostics, and finding solutions to various machine-related business problems.

What is Splunk Monitoring Used For?

At its bare bones, Splunk is a tool that captures a machine's complex and unstructured data, extracts what is relevant, and presents it as actionable intelligence. It does the hard work of cleaning up all the chaos and jumble of machine data and processes it so a human user, such as a system administrator, can understand. The data it presents makes it easier to understand machine output, troubleshoot problems, and separate actionable information from everything else.

Splunk is a log file browser with extra steps. The additional steps, in this case, are added functionalities and features that make it easy for an organisation to use the machine log file. Its built-in search processing language (SPL) powers the search feature to make it easy to find a specific term or phrase in the log.

As a software platform, Splunk also features a storage tool that eliminates the need for backend storage for machine data. This handy feature makes the platform ideal for collecting, storing, and analysing large amounts of data from multiple machines or the same machine over long periods.

In addition, Splunk allows the user to input various data formats to expand its capabilities. Organisations can extend the power of Splunk by inputting data in CSV, TSV, PSV, JSON, weblogs, XML, and more.

Splunk Monitoring Use Cases and How They Can Benefit Your Organisation

Splunk Monitoring is used in three areas: application monitoring and alerting, searching and troubleshooting, and decision-making support.

Application Monitoring and Alerting

Many organisations must monitor multiple applications running in different environments. A good example is an organisation that uses application-generated data to provide customer support. Splunk enables the organisation to monitor the real-time infrastructure that powers the applications. The organisation can use Splunk Monitoring to assess application performance, identify issues and detect attacks before they affect services or customers.

Splunk monitoring analyses machine logs, identifies patterns and trends, and compares thresholds. It then establishes events from the data and monitors streams as they come in, so the user does not need to.

The user can also set up Splunk to execute specific actions when certain conditions are met or events triggered. For instance, the system can send an email, run a script or a program, or create a support ticket when an alert is generated. In such a case, Splunk can be used to report the availability of third-party services or alert system admin when an internal site is unavailable.

Searching and Troubleshooting

When an organisation needs to troubleshoot its service environment or infrastructure processes, they may often need to investigate machine-generated data. They will need to look for specific occurrences of errors, incidences, events, or alerts. Typical machine logs and machine data are sheer in size. Because of this, it is virtually impossible to search for these variables manually.

Splunk is built as an automated performance tracking and indexing platform. The organisation can use it to index data to allow faster querying and searching and to create actionable measurements using the indexed data. From this data, they can further develop models to forecast future trends and detect patterns that lead to expected outcomes.

Unlike most monitoring tools, Splunk works well in multiple environments and not just for websites. It can be seamlessly integrated as a standalone enterprise platform and optimised to do more to troubleshoot hybrid systems in real-time.

Decision-Making Support

In today's fast-paced business world, making a loss or a profit or retaining or losing a customer depends on an organisation's ability to make split-second decisions. Sound decisions must be well-informed and backed with data, typically generated by machines in real-time.

One notable use case of Splunk is how organisations measure predictors that inform their decisions. These predictors typically fluctuate with trends and are hard to pinpoint in advance. Key decision-makers in an organisation, such as operation managers, planners, and top management, can use Splunk to support critical decisions that affect organisation-wide productivity, costs, time, and service user management.

Splunk works well to help an organisation make the right decisions because it is flexible, adaptable, and, with the right Synthetic Monitoring tool, interactive. Organisations can develop configurations, apps, and other features to provide end-user experiences across multiple platforms. 

Why 2 Steps is an Effective Solution for Splunk Users

To truly take advantage of the power of Splunk and develop end-user experience monitoring across multiple applications, locations, and platforms, they must build a synthetic or directed monitoring tool to bridge Splunk with the user interface. Ready-made tool 2 Steps does this and much more by incorporating an unrivalled user experience across mainframes, web, windows, and mobile platforms.

2 Steps offers essential end-user observability and protects enterprise applications and the customer experience. It features two-factor authentication and empowers anyone to build user journeys quickly without worrying about the code.

With 2 Steps, your organisation can more easily leverage the power of Splunk to measure application performance in the real world in real-time and even replay user journeys in video format.

 Conclusion

Is your organisation looking to automate or monitor a platform, application or user transactions? If so, Splunk can be a great tool to transform how you manage and run your infrastructure, applications, or services, regardless of the platform.

2 Steps can help your organisation optimise staff and the end-user experience in a few steps without writing code. Contact 2 Steps today to discover how you can quickly build an exceptional product.