Splunk Updates SignalFx APM Platform

Splunk today unfurled its first major update to the SignalFx application performance management (APM) platform since acquiring it last October.

Karthik Rau, general manager for application performance management (APM) at Splunk, said SignalFx Microservices APM combines for the first time the SignalFx platform with Omnition, a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform for implementing distributed tracing as an alternative to application sampling that Splunk also acquired last year.

In addition, the latest iteration of SignalFx adds a Kubernetes Navigator tool to a SignalFx Infrastructure Monitoring module to make it easier to manage Kubernetes clusters alongside the microservices-based applications running on that platform. The module surfaces recommendations to expedite triaging and troubleshooting based on machine learning algorithms that are embedded in the platform. Splunk has also enabled workflow integration across Kubernetes Navigator and Splunk Enterprise and Splunk Cloud to provide IT teams with additional insights and context, noted Rau.

With the acquisition of SignalFx, Rau said Splunk is at aiming to advance two major DevOps trends. The first is the rise of open source agent software that makes it increasingly feasible to instrument the entire IT environment. Omnition, prior to its acquisition by Splunk, was a founding member of and contributor to the OpenTelemetry project now being managed under the auspices of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).

The second is the need to eliminate relying on sampling in favor of employing distributed tracing to be able to analyze every event that has occurred within an IT environment.

At a time when IT environments are getting more complex, Rau said being able to resolve IT issues is critical. Modern applications based on microservices can be especially problematic given all the dependencies involved, he noted. In contrast to legacy APM platforms built to monitor monolithic application environments, SignalFx is built from the ground up to address application environments based on microservices, he said Rau, noting core to that effort is the ability to ingest massive amounts of distributed tracing data.

Historically, APM platforms were used sparingly to help manage the most mission-critical applications in the enterprise largely because of concerns about cost. Given the complexity of modern applications, however, it’s become apparent that observability is now a core tenet of any approach to implementing best DevOps practices. The issue many DevOps teams will need to address is determining to what degree the existing tools they have for observing their IT environments sufficiently meet the requirements of new classes of applications. In many cases, that decision may be predicated on the rate at which those organizations are embracing microservices-based applications.

Of course, Splunk is not the only vendor making a case for an APM platform optimized for microservices. Competition between emerging and legacy providers of APM platforms that have added support for containers and Kubernetes clusters is already fierce. The real issue going forward, however, is determining which of the platforms will enable DevOps teams to discover the most relevant issues soonest. After all, when short-handed DevOps teams encounter an issue, every second it takes to remediate that problem counts.

— Mike Vizard