Splunk is an important tool for many organizations, but its costs can quickly add up. In this practical guide, you'll learn how to deploy effective Splunk cost reduction and deployment optimization strategies with the help of Process Tempo.
SUMMARY: Splunk is a widely used analytics platform that is effective at analyzing large amounts of data and providing composite views of system utilization, but it presents challenges, including high costs, data sprawl, and training requirements. Process Tempo, a graph data and analytics platform, is an ideal solution to address these challenges. Through automating archiving, periodic quota audits, and rebalancing, Process Tempo can effectively reduce costs for Splunk licensees in both the short and long term. Process Tempo also offers features such as self-service dashboarding, integration, data modeling, scalability, and improved data access, making it a valuable tool for not only optimizing Splunk deployment, but enhancing overall analytics performance.
A Fortune 100 company has been able to save over $1 million annually by implementing Process Tempo's Splunk Archive Strategy. By summarizing data from Splunk into a summary digest and storing it in Process Tempo on a daily and nightly basis via an automated process, the company was able to reduce its Splunk license usage and costs while still maintaining access to the data they needed. This strategy not only provided cost savings in the short term but also facilitated long-term trend analysis and allowed the company to gain insights into their data that would have been otherwise inaccessible.
About Splunk
Splunk is a powerful analytics platform designed to gather, summarize, and analyze information generated from servers and application logs. Commonly used in industries such as finance, healthcare, and IT security, Splunk excels at consuming large amounts of data from various sources and providing composite views to help understand system utilization. Splunk also provides a rich query language for querying this data, and its database is designed to scale to house significant amounts of data.
Challenges of Splunk
Despite its capabilities, the use of Splunk presents several drawbacks that IT professionals and decision-makers should be aware of:
High Costs: One of the main challenges of using Splunk is its cost. While the platform offers significant value, it can be very expensive, especially if an organization does not have a clear licensing strategy in place. The cost of licenses can quickly add up, leading to budgetary concerns.
Performance Concerns: As an organization's data volume grows, analytics performance can suffer. Users often complain about slow querying and performance issues when analyzing more than a few weeks' worth of data, especially when working with large data sets. This can impact productivity and make it more difficult to extract insights from data.
Training Requirements: Splunk is a complex platform that requires a significant amount of training to use effectively. Accessing and analyzing data stored in Splunk can be challenging, particularly for analysts who are not familiar with the platform. Moreover, users must have appropriate authorization levels to access the data they need, which can create additional barriers to usage.
Data Sprawl: Splunk's automated processing can lead to uncontrolled data growth across various systems, storage locations, and applications within an organization. This inefficiency can lead to data silos, security risks, and compliance issues. Splunk data sprawl also contributes to higher license costs and can make it difficult for organizations to manage and analyze their Splunk data effectively.
Mitigating Splunk Costs
Organizations can implement various procedures to prevent runaway Splunk license fees, such as assigning usage quotas to each business unit or department and automatically removing data once it ages beyond a fixed time period. However, these approaches have their own set of challenges and consequences. Usage patterns change over time, and quotas may not always align with actual needs, leading to inefficiencies and suboptimal resource allocation.
Introducing Process Tempo
Process Tempo is a graph data and analytics platform that addresses the challenges associated with leveraging and maximizing the returns of the Splunk platform. Process Tempo combines a graph data warehouse with integrated governance, self-service dashboards, and embedded workflow features, allowing organizations to quickly deploy new data-driven applications without writing code. This makes it an ideal solution for organizations looking to optimize their use of Splunk.
Process Tempo as a Splunk Archive Solution
Using Process Tempo as a Splunk archive platform can help organizations reduce costs, improve analytics performance, support long-term trend analysis, and make Splunk data more accessible and easier to analyze. It does so in three key ways:
Automated Archiving: Process Tempo provides an automated archive solution for Splunk data. It summarizes data into a digest and stores it in Process Tempo on a daily or nightly basis. This keeps the archived data small and manageable, while making it available to users who may not have direct access to Splunk data.
Periodic Quota Audits and Rebalancing: Process Tempo simplifies periodic audits of Splunk usage by collecting data and mapping actual usage to each department. This perspective enables organizations to identify imbalances in usage quotas, leading to potential cost savings and better Splunk license negotiations.
Short and Long-Term Savings: Implementing Process Tempo as a Splunk archive platform can result in both short-term and long-term cost reductions. By balancing Splunk quotas, safely removing data, and negotiating future Splunk licenses effectively, organizations can unlock substantial savings in the short-term. Additionally, the performance gains and long-term trend analysis capabilities provided by Process Tempo allows analysts to leverage Splunk data continuously and use it for a broader set of use cases, leading to a greater return on investment and improved analytics adoption.
Additional Features of Process Tempo
Self-service Dashboarding
Process Tempo offers a simple interface for building dashboards with minimal training required. Users can also connect third-party visualization tools such as Tableau or Power BI directly to Process Tempo.
Splunk Integration
Process Tempo provides an out-of-the-box Splunk connector leverages the native Splunk Query Language, making it easy to archive specific data into Process Tempo.
Data Modeling
With Process Tempo's data modeling features, organizations can merge other data assets with Splunk data to create a more comprehensive picture. This makes it easy to bring in department information and user hierarchies that are required for mapping usage data to each department.
Scalability and Flexibility
Process Tempo leverages an embedded graph database called Neo4j, which uses a NoSQL query language and offers an extremely flexible data storage model. This means that each department can archive data in a format that fits their specific needs without having to make changes to the underlying data structure.
Improved Data Access
Process Tempo makes it easier for analysts to access and analyze Splunk data, increasing the value of the information collected and encouraging more widespread adoption of analytics within the organization.
Conclusion
Process Tempo is an ideal solution for organizations looking to optimize their Splunk deployment and address the common challenges associated with the platform. By implementing Process Tempo as a Splunk archive platform, organizations can achieve both short-term and long-term cost reductions, improve analytics performance, support long-term trend analysis, and make Splunk data more accessible and easier to analyze.