Splunk ups Industrial IoT Operational Technology (OT) team tools
Real-time operational intelligence specialist Splunk hosted its annual .conf conference in Orlando this October to detail the state of its platform development, showcase customer use cases and dig into what’s likely to be toothsome and flavoursome in the world of machine data and log file analytics on the road ahead.
Splunk is called Splunk in reference to spelunking (cave, or in this case data, exploration) – and the .conf event itself is amusingly called .conf18 in reference to the .config file extension, which contain the parameters and initial settings for running a software application, server process or operating system calibration.
Into this year’s updates then and it appears Splunk has been busy.
Among the product news tabled at Splunk’s .conf18 conference this year were details of the firm’s Splunk for Industrial IoT (IIoT).
This software is a combination of some of the firm’s core technologies: Splunk Enterprise, Splunk Machine Learning Toolkit, and Splunk Industrial Asset Intelligence (IAI), which are now brought together to provide a view of complex industrial data.
Operational Technology (OT)
Splunk says it sees particular deployment relevance for Operational Technology (OT) teams and organisations in manufacturing, oil and gas, power, transportation, energy and utilities.
Ammar Maraqa, senior vice president and general manager of IoT markets at Splunk says that the software itself gives users data analytics and reporting powered by machine learning, combined with new drag-and-drop capabilities specifically to address common challenges for industrial organisations, such as unplanned downtime across disparate systems.
Splunk Industrial IoT also includes Security and Compliance for Industrial Control Systems (ICS) to safeguard ICS systems from emerging and persistent cyber threats. This allows, if you will, OT environments to embrace an analytics-driven approach to security.
According to Splunk’s Maraqa, industrial OT operators are increasingly looking to their sensor and other machine data to monitor and diagnose operational issues from industrial assets such as turbines, pumps and compressors.
“Splunk for Industrial IoT gives customers real-time visibility into the health of these assets, providing monitoring, alerting and diagnostics across multiple data sources. Splunk for Industrial IoT also helps monitor the uptime and availability of ICS, SCADA systems, distributed control systems and process control software,” said Maraqa.
Splunk for Industrial IoT gives customers the ability to apply what the company claims to be ‘proven algorithms’ for prediction, anomaly detection, clustering and forecasting to help identify early warning signs and predict downtime of ICS and critical assets.
Splunk also announced Splunk IT Service Intelligence (ITSI).
The software itself is a driven by Splunk’s own machine learning engineering and is designed to automate incident investigation and workflows across all data sources.
“IT environments are complex and dynamic and IT teams are constantly under pressure to make sense of their data and take action” said Rick Fitz, senior vice president and general manager of IT markets at Splunk. “The ability to use machine learning and artificial intelligence to predict service degradation and prevent issues allows these teams to focus on driving value for the business. We make smart IT teams smarter with a platform that brings together all the data to provide complete visibility.”
With Splunk ITSI 4.0. Customers are now able to use Splunk App for Infrastructure with an interface from Splunk ITSI. This gives users access to a full-scale monitoring platform that can correlate their server data across the organisation.
Splunk App for Infrastructure gives system administrators and site reliability engineers a unified approach to monitoring and troubleshooting. Customers can now also access Splunk App for Infrastructure data directly from Splunk ITSI to get more detail at the server level.
Splunk for IIoT and Splunk IT Service Intelligence (ITSI) will be generally available on October 30, 2018.
