Splunk Expands IT Monitoring Technology To The Cloud

The new Splunk Storm, running on Amazon Web Services (AWS), is based on the company's on-premise software that collects massive streams of operational data from applications, servers, websites, networks and mobile devices. The service helps IT managers quickly diagnose and troubleshoot problems with cloud applications running on AWS, Heroku, Google App Engine, Rackspace and other cloud platforms.

"For a big class of customers, the cloud is the only way they operate," said Leena Joshi, Splunk senior director of solutions marketing, in an interview with CRN.

[Related: Amazon Glacier: Low-Cost Cloud Archiving, But Not If Data Needs Occasional Access ]

The Splunk Storm service, which has been in beta test for several months, runs as a multitenant service on AWS and automatically provisions the IT resources needed to store and analyze system data, according to the company. Subscribers pay a monthly fee and can scale the service up or down as needed, according to Joshi.

The cloud service offers more than 250 commands for searching and analyzing collected data.

Splunk follows a "freemium" go-to-market strategy, offering a free version of its software with a limit of 500 MB of data per day. Splunk already has some 4,400 paying customers who use the vendor's on-premise applications.

Splunk has debuted a series of new products in the last six months. In June the company debuted a Splunk application for real-time auditing and monitoring of the Microsoft Windows Server Active Directory. It also began shipping a Splunk app for VMware for extracting data from virtualized systems.

Thursday Splunk reported sales of $44.5 million in its second quarter ended July 31, up 71 percent from the same period one year earlier, including license revenue of $30.2 million.

PUBLISHED AUG. 31, 2012