Splunk 4.2 delivers new levels of operational visibility

Splunk has announced the general availability of Splunk 4.2, its software that collects, indexes and harnesses any machine data generated by an organisation's IT systems and infrastructure -- physical, virtual and in the cloud.

Splunk provides operational intelligence software used to monitor, report and analyse real-time machine data as well as terabytes of historical data-located on-premise or in the cloud. Almost half of the Fortune 100 and more than 2,300 enterprises, service providers and government organisations in 74 countries use Splunk to improve service levels, reduce IT operations costs, mitigate security risks, and drive new levels of operational visibility.

Splunk 4.2 builds on the innovation of previous releases, adding real-time alerting, a new Universal Forwarder, improved usability and performance, and centralised management capabilities for distributed Splunk deployments.

"This new release has a strong emphasis on supporting organisations that have deployed Splunk around the globe," said Erik Swan, Splunk CTO and co-founder. "In Splunk 4.2 we made it easier to deploy Splunk to tens of thousands of machines, with simpler data collection and real-time alerting across a global infrastructure."

Machine data holds a wealth of information that can be used to obtain operational intelligence and provide valuable insights for IT and the business. Splunk is the engine for machine data that helps enterprises improve service levels, reduce operations costs, mitigate security risks, enable compliance and create new product and service offerings.

Splunk 4.2 new features include:

-- Real-time alerting. Provides immediate notification and response for events, patterns, incidents and attacks as they occur.

-- Universal Forwarder. New dedicated lightweight forwarder delivers secure, distributed, real-time data collection from thousands of endpoints with a significantly reduced footprint.

-- Easier and faster. New ways to visualise data, quick start guides for new users, integrated workflows for common tasks and up to 10 times faster search experience in large-scale distributed deployments.

-- Easier management of Splunk. New centralised deployment monitoring and license management facilitate the management of multiple Splunk instances from a single location.

"Splunk 4.2 increases user productivity and our partners and customers will find Splunk easier to implement and manage," said Robert Lau, Area VP, Asia Pacific & Japan at Splunk. "The new release features new self-guided data input and integrated workflows, enabling users to develop new applications, generate alerts and reports with ease."