News

Splunk and Hunk Get Big Data Updates

• By David Ramel
• October 29, 2014

Splunk Inc. yesterday announced new versions of its machine data and Big Data offerings, Splunk and Hunk, designed to provide powerful analytics capabilities to more users.

Splunk Enterprise 6.2 is a platform for gleaning real-time operational intelligence from machine data generated by IT systems whether they're physical, on-premises installations, virtualized or cloud-based. The platform works with various kinds of machine data such as customer clickstreams and transactions, network activity and call records coming from applications, application servers, Web Servers, databases, virtual machines (VMs), sensors, and many more.

Also moving to version 6.2 is Hunk, described as Splunk analytics for Hadoop and NoSQL data stores, now available on an hourly basis from the Amazon Elastic MapReduce (Amazon EMR) console in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud.

The flagship Splunk Enterprise platform "delivers simplified analysis and powerful pattern detection that enables more users across IT and the business to discover relationships in their data and build advanced analytics," Splunk said in a statement.

For easier onboarding of machine data, Splunk Enterprise 6.2 features a new wizard interface to provide guidance for users who preview, load and prepare machine data for analysis.

To simplify and accelerate Pivot operations, new functionality lets a user analyze any machine data and quickly create dashboards without having to be an expert in the Splunk Search Processing Language.

An enhanced event pattern detection feature groups similar events so users can glean meaningful patterns and insights that might otherwise remain hidden.

Finally, the enterprise platform can reportedly reduce total cost of ownership by allowing for more concurrent usage capacity and doing away with requirements for shared storage.

Hunk 6.2, meanwhile, also features new functionality to help more users explore traditional Big Data housed on Hadoop and in NoSQL databases.

Running on 64-bit Linux, Hunk "lets you stream data from NoSQL and other data stores, such as Apache Accumulo, Apache Cassandra, Couchbase, MongoDB and Neo4j to explore and analyze data across your Big Data architecture," the company said on its site.

The new hourly Hunk service lets users for the first time use AWS-provisioned, automatically configured Hunk instances as needed with the new Amazon EMR Console 1-Click Purchase plan.

Also new is the Hunk Sandbox, a single download designed to help users learn how to interactively search and analyze data on major OSes without the hassle of creating and configuring a Hadoop cluster.

New Hunk user apps were also announced for data analytics and visualization via prepackaged connections for MongoDB and Sqrrl (Apache Accumulo). Another app performs AWS elastic load balancing.

The spunky Splunk -- with the motto: "take the sh out of IT" -- offers its products for free 60-day trials, along with a free online sandbox. The flagship platform also comes in a free edition.

"The latest versions of Splunk Enterprise and Hunk significantly advance the capability to deliver powerful analytics to a broad range of new users," said company exec Guido Schroeder in a statement. "Splunk Enterprise 6.2 also reduces total cost of ownership through improved scalability; and Hunk 6.2 on AWS EMR drastically decreases time to value for anyone looking to gain value out of data they have been storing in Hadoop."