Splunk announced the general availability of the Splunk App for Stream. This app offers a new software approach for capturing real-time streaming wire data. Wire data is a unique kind of machine data transmitted between applications over networks, which can provide information about business activity, application performance, security and IT infrastructure issues, without needing code instrumentation. The Splunk App for Stream easily captures wire data for additional insights when using Splunk Enterprise and Splunk Cloud for security, fraud detection, compliance, application management, IT operations and business analytics.

The Splunk App for Stream is free for Splunk Enterprise or Splunk Cloud customers.

“The Splunk App for Stream, the first product delivered from our acquisition of Cloudmeter last year, is a new approach that further enhances the value that customers can realize with Splunk software,” said Leena Joshi, senior director of solutions marketing, Splunk. “Unlike traditional and appliance-based solutions, which are difficult to deploy, especially in public cloud infrastructures, the Splunk App for Stream enables customers to gain immediate wire data access on-premises or in public, private or hybrid cloud infrastructures. It opens up for our customers a whole new class of data sets to provide continuous IT, security and business insights.”

“The Splunk App for Stream is a valuable new extension to the Splunk software platform,” said Peter Christy, research director at 451 Research. “The in-depth analysis of wire data given Splunk’s proven scalability and powerful analytics could be a game-changer for the IT industry.”

The Splunk App for Stream can be rapidly deployed to collect, aggregate and filter wire data from both network endpoints, such as virtual machines in public clouds or virtual desktops, and the network perimeter, such as routers, switches and firewalls. With fine-grained filters and aggregation rules defined through the app interface, customers can dynamically control data volumes and capture only the wire data that is relevant for the needs of their specific analysis. By correlating wire data with other machine data, such as logs, events and metrics, customers can now gain new valuable insights into application and infrastructure performance, operational issues, transaction paths, system downtime, infrastructure relationships, security vulnerabilities, compliance and customer behavior.

Top use cases for the Splunk App for Stream include:

- Application Management: Provides granular data on transaction response times, transaction traces, transaction paths, network performance and database queries without requiring any instrumentation of the application.

- IT Operations: Empowers administrators to pinpoint root-cause of issues faster, map dependencies of critical infrastructure services and ensure the delivery of services at the levels required by the business.

- Security: Enables in-depth monitoring and real-time correlation to drive sophisticated analytics on breaches, threat detection, intelligence gathering and threat prevention. Can be deployed in the midst of a breach/incident investigation to gain insight into network traffic from any system of interest not previously monitored.

- Business Analytics: Captures web interactions and key metrics such as time spent on page, bounce rates, navigation paths and product performance, without the need to tag individual pages. Improves customer satisfaction and conversions, prevents drop-offs and can boost online revenues. Enables real time end-to-end insights into business processes such as order management, provisioning, trade execution span and others, without requiring specific instrumentation.