Big data just got its Tricorder | Splunk Blogs

Big data just got its Tricorder | Splunk Blogs

In Star Trek a Tricorder is described as:

“A Tricorder is a multifunction hand-held device useful for data sensing, analysis, and recording data, with many specialized abilities which make it an asset to crews aboard starships and space stations as well as on away missions”.

I’m happy to announce the launch of the Splunk Mobile App, which unofficially I’m calling the “Big Data Tricorder”. You can download it from here (iTunes).

The Splunk Mobile App allows you to take the Splunk (Starship) Enterprise platform and allows you to explore strange new insights, to seek out new data and new visualizations, to boldly go where no machine data has gone before.

You can find more in the official press release here but I’ve been playing with the app for the last few weeks and its great. Splunk has always been about making machine data accessible, usable and valuable.

The Splunk Mobile App changes extends that – we’re now making machine data accessible, usable and valuable, anywhere.

A lot of companies are now taking a “mobile first” strategy – engaging users with big data is key to its success and the visualization and analysis of your data needs to go mobile too.  The Splunk Mobile App is a native app to give the best possible experience for end users to help them engage with the data and the insights it gives them.

Look around the next conference you go to – how many people are using a web browser on a laptop and how many people are using a tablet or phone? With the rise of BYOD – employees will need an easy to use, flexible way to engage with operational intelligence. I was at the Gartner CIO conference recently where I heard the term “business moments” and a discussion on how informed decisions need to be made in real-time and hence they are increasingly mobile. That’s why the Splunk Mobile App was built – putting your data and operational intelligence in the most convenient place for people so they can take the right action in real time.

With this first release, the mobile app is focused on two audiences:

The subject matter experts such IT analysts and line of business analytics users. These kinds of users will be able to securely view, interact and share machine data insights on their mobile device.
Splunk users and administrators who will be able to make available Splunk Enterprise dashboards, data visualizations and Operational Intelligence that users can view, interact with and share in a native mobile format on their device.

I’ve been using the app for a week or so now and here’s a quick tour through some of the things I’ve been trying out:

First up – you open up the app, log in and you can see your applications, favorites and dashboards (in this case on an iPhone 5):

The integration with the device is pretty tight with alerts being pushed through the notification mechanism – for example in this case you can see an alert around “Server Load Capacity” and the ease of being able to click on it and drill down into the relevant data and/or Splunk dashboard.

You can also see all your alerts (in this case on an iPad):

Once you’ve opened up a dashboard, you can open an individual visualization or chart and chose to export it, make it a favorite or even edit and share it:

I liked the collaborative elements and the ability to annotate it. You can highlight key points and then share it as you can see below (on an iPhone and then an iPad):

You can still search for information (in this case the ISDN NUMBER search box) and you can see this in the iPad dashboard below:

The dashboards render quickly and I’d say the Splunk dashboards look even nicer on an iPad than a Mac or PC.

You can download the app now from here. I hope it is useful and helps engage your users with Splunk and Operational Intelligence. There are going to be ongoing enhancements to the mobile app so keep an eye out for new features and functionality over the rest of this year. Any feedback is most welcome in the comments below.

There aren’t any plans to add a teleport function to Splunk in the near future but if you’re using Splunk (or considering it) and want to give anyone the ability to alert, access and analyze their big data – check out the Splunk Mobile App.

Set big data to stun…

Source:

Big data just got its Tricorder | Splunk Blogs

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