Splunk augments IT search platform with change management add-on

LAS VEGAS -- IT search software maker Splunk this week at Interop intends to unveil two software add-ons to its flagship platform that the company says will help IT better manage change.

Splunk for Change Management is an add-on application designed to sit on top of the vendor's IT search platform and add value with specific capabilities designed for the change management task at hand. For instance, Splunk for Change Management uses Splunk's search and indexing capabilities to pour through configurations, change audit events, error logs and service desk tickets to identify unauthorized changes more quickly.

"We are delivering specific packaged applications that contain predefined alerts, canned reports and other notifications specific to spotting unauthorized change," says Christina Noren, vice president of product management at Splunk. "Because the rate of error that occurs with unauthorized changes, customers were really asking for a way to be alerted to file system changes through Splunk. It just made sense to add these capabilities."

Splunk for Change Management includes dashboard views and more than 40 reports designed to show changes across all the data center components, including applications, servers and network devices. Predefined alerts spot unauthorized changes based on configuration variations and the software correlates that data with service desk systems with which the application is integrated. And the application also includes predefined searches to help IT managers identify service-impacting changes more easily, Splunk says.

Spunk's flagship software, currently in Version 3.2, searches for management data across logs, message queues, configuration files, SNMP traps and database transactions to more quickly correlate events that could be related to a failure -- and that network managers would typically have to search manually. The add-on change management product installs on the same server as the Splunk IT search software.