Splunk .conf22 focuses on scaling observability for the cloud

At this point, nearly every business is digital. The strength and performance of an organization's application environment often determines its competitive success. Nearly every technology vendor highlights that connection daily -- including at their conferences -- but few of their technologies play as large a role in ensuring application environments operate at peak efficiency than observability.

This year at Splunk .conf22, the focus was on ensuring organizations can reap the benefits of observability practices across multi-cloud ecosystems.

An effective observability practice is essential for any digital organization. Modern enterprises span multiple sites, clouds and business operations that depend on apps and data. To scale your business, your application and data environment can't simply scale along with it in tandem; it must scale ahead. Technology drives the business -- not the other way around.

Observability promotes better software quality and improves root-cause analysis. Better software often translates to better business success. But even with observability in place, trying to get a handle on your application environment is always a challenge at scale.

In an ESG survey of IT, DevOps and application development professionals responsible for evaluating, purchasing, managing and building application infrastructure, 64% of the respondents agreed that "the adoption of public cloud or multiple public cloud providers had made observability significantly more difficult."

Splunk. conf22 introduced multiple innovations, all of which offer a variety of benefits. But the high-level takeaway is that contemporary businesses need multi-cloud scale, and Splunk is focused on delivering that.

Several key announcements from Splunk focused on addressing observability-related challenges:

• Data Manager for Splunk Cloud Platform. This application simplifies data ingestion from cloud-native resources, reducing operational impacts to multi-cloud environments. Originally released for AWS, Data Manager for Splunk Cloud Platform now also supports Microsoft Azure, with Google Cloud Platform support targeted for later this summer.
• Ingest Actions. Announced in beta last year, this feature simplifies the process of getting data into Splunk, while ensuring the data is in the right location and structure. This further reduces the operational burden of working with data at scale.
• Splunk Enterprise 9.0. The latest version of Splunk Enterprise adds Microsoft Azure with SmartStore for Azure to its list of cost-effective cold storage options -- joining AWS and Google Cloud Platform. According to Splunk, this offering can help Splunk Enterprise customers reduce operation costs up to 70%. Reducing data observability cost is a must, as 71% of the ESG survey respondents agreed that "observability data (metrics, logs, traces) is growing at a concerning rate." By reducing storage costs, operations can promote better observability, which translates to better application experiences and ultimately a better business.

There was more to the event and the announcements, and I highly recommend you check out the full list.

When I combine what I see from Splunk with our ESG research findings, I am convinced that every business needs an observability practice. The benefits can be transformational. If you don't believe me, then listen to current observability users: ESG research found that 86% of them plan to expand their observability tools and practices in the next six months.

Splunk is well positioned to be an essential technology provider for the modern enterprise, delivering capabilities that every business needs. Most organizations are still at the start of their observability journeys, and there will be a lot more innovation for them to incorporate into their operations over the next few years. Splunk's innovations are positioning it as a leader in its industry -- and should therefore be part of any observability-related conversation.

ESG is a division of TechTarget.