Splunk launches Observability Cloud for multicloud application environments

Data analytics firm Splunk Inc. is revamping the application and infrastructure monitoring experience for customers with the launch of its new Splunk Observability Cloud that helps detect operational issues affecting apps and the environments they run in, as well as providing investigation and troubleshooting capabilities.

The Splunk Observability Cloud is being made generally available today after it was unveiled during the company’s October 2020 Splunk .conf event. The company said at the time it was launching Splunk Observability Cloud to address the enterprise shift to multicloud information technology architectures.

That shift can cause major headaches for DevOps teams as it means their applications and services run across a sprawling infrastructure environment, making it hard to keep track of everything that happens within it. With the Splunk Observability Cloud, DevOps and IT teams get the benefit of a unified interface that helps to keep track of all their application monitoring data that comes from sources such as app metrics, traces and logs. This data is collected in real-time at any scale, Splunk said.

“With the shift to cloud, IT and DevOps teams are now wrestling with more operational complexity that is compounded by too many existing monitoring tools that have blind spots, siloed data and disjointed workflows,” said Splunk Chief Product Officer Sendur Sellakumar. “The Splunk Observability Cloud helps IT and DevOps teams conquer complexity and accelerate cloud transformation for their organizations.”

IT observability is an emerging market segment that’s rapidly becoming a big deal for many enterprises. It involves monitoring apps so that operators can identify the root cause of any issues that crop up and resolve them quickly.

Other players in the observability segment include Sumo Logic Inc., DataDog Inc., and also Amazon Web Services Inc., which yesterday launched its Amazon DevOps Guru product. With its history rooted in big data and infrastructure and application log intelligence, Splunk sees observability as a natural target for its own expertise.

Splunk said its Observability Cloud combines its Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring, Splunk Application Monitoring, Splunk On-Call, Splunk Real User Monitoring, Splunk Synthetic Monitoring and Splunk Log Observer offerings into a single product. The last three tools are all new products being made generally available today.