Splunk Enterprise 4.3 Launched

January 24, 2012

Splunk Enterprise 4.3, the company's flagship software for collecting, indexing and harnessing machine data.

"All kinds of companies are using Splunk to harness the value in their machine data. With their needs in mind, we've made Splunk 4.3 more powerful and usable for any situation and on any device," said Erik Swan, Splunk CTO and co-founder.

Splunk 4.3 offers benefits for both IT and business users:

• Mobile: New non-Flash user interface delivers the power of Splunk anywhere
• More powerful: Up to 10x more concurrent users and 10x faster search, on the same deployment
• Easier to use: Dashboards now editable by business users and executives.

The Splunk 4.3 beta program has resulted in positive feedback from its customers:

'Almost everything I do using Splunk's user interface takes half the time in 4.3. The new features mean that I am able to do so much more, and in a more intuitive way,' said Eddie Satterly, senior director of architecture & engineering at Expedia, one of the world's largest online travel agencies. "At Expedia, we have over 2,700 users of Splunk, and being able to provide dashboards on iPads means we can get more data to more people when they want it."

"At Ceryx, messaging and collaboration is our business, and we go to Splunk to monitor service levels and look for abuse. Having Splunk dashboards available on iPads means we now gain real-time visibility across our infrastructure from wherever we are," said Derek Mock, director of software development at Ceryx, a Toronto-based managed IT services company specializing in private cloud-based messaging and collaboration solutions for enterprise clients.

"The data preview feature speeds up the administration of Splunk and saves time so I can deliver services faster to customers and clients," said Thomas Paulsen, systems administrator at global multichannel retailer Otto Group GmbH. New features in Splunk 4.3 include:

• A more powerful user interface
  • Availability on non-Flash-enabled mobile devices
  • Being easier for business users: Users no longer have to edit XML to edit dashboards
  • Ability to access real-time and historical analysis in a single step
  • Accessing vital granular trend data at-a-glance via sparklines
• Speed and scale
  • Up to 10X faster "needle in a haystack" search
  • Up to 10X more concurrent users on same deployment
• Easier manageability
  • Ability to preview new data sources before indexing
  • Expanded controls for operational monitoring
  • Easier alignment to complex enterprise security policies.

"Splunk is at the forefront of helping organizations harness their big data," said Rachel Chalmers, research director of infrastructure management at The 451 Group. "Splunk 4.3 is an exciting, logical and evolutionary step that embraces mobility and increased ease of use. Splunk 4.3 is especially important for business users, with dashboards that provide insights - integrating real-time and historical data for analysis, and which are easy for business users to personalize on the fly."

Splunk 4.3 is available immediately as a free download.