Splunk introduces native support for histograms as a metric data type within Observability Cloud with Explicit Bucket Histograms, allowing users to efficiently capture and transmit distributions of measurements and compute statistical calculations like percentiles without increasing costs. Explicit Bucket Histograms empowers users with unparalleled analytical capabilities as they can now seamlessly ingest, store, and query histograms. Native histogram support in Observability Cloud means users will no longer have to run special infrastructure to pre-aggregate their percentile data, which could incur additional costs and obscure source data. Natively ingesting histograms also eliminates the need to send and store each unique observation, which could prove costly, especially for cloud-forward enterprises.  Open Telemetry Native Flexibility And Accuracy For Your Performance Data Histograms, as defined by OpenTelemetry, give users a cost-effective way to send data to Splunk Observability while maintaining the flexibility to analyze performance data in real time. Histograms combine data for the min, max, sum, and count of a population along with a set of buckets that allow end users to compute percentiles. Because of the increase in data represented by a histogram, a histogram MTS will be equivalent to 8 standard MTS. Billing reports will track customers’ total usage and new metrics will track histogram-specific usage. Histograms For Your Charts And Detectors Like gauge and counter metrics, histogram metrics can be used in charts and detectors. Explicit Bucket Histograms are useful for performance data, such as request latency or response time. The most common way to use histogram data is to calculate percentiles for your charts and detectors. When creating a chart or detector with histogram data, users can: Compute any percentile Compute the percentile across multiple different services Compute a percentile over a period of time Getting Started With Histograms in Observability Cloud Histograms are defined in OpenTelemetry. They can be sent into Observability Cloud: Via the Prometheus receiver in the OpenTelemetry Collector: The Prometheus receiver will scrape Prometheus histograms to be sent into Splunk Observability Cloud. Many existing infrastructure components - like Kubernetes and Istio - make histograms available for scraping. Using OpenTelemetry libraries: Users can instrument their code to send in histograms using OpenTelemetry libraries for all major programming languages. Learn more and start using histograms today! ... View more

Splunk has extended the OpenTelemetry Collector zero configuration auto instrumentation experience to Node.js applications running in Linux and Kubernetes environments providing a streamlined onboarding experience for even more platforms. The zero configuration capability, which is already available for Java and .Net, eliminates the need for manual instrumentation and automatically instruments customers’ back-end applications and services to capture and report distributed traces and metrics to the Splunk Distribution of OpenTelemetry Collector and then to Splunk APM.  You can start streaming traces and monitoring distributed applications with Splunk APM in minutes without any additional configuration or instrumentation of your back-end services or applications before deployment.  Read our documentation to learn more. ... View more

We’re excited to introduce native Service Level Objective (SLO) management in Splunk Observability Cloud beginning with the release of SLOs to track the success rate of APM services. With this new built-in experience, we’re making it easier than ever for you to track the reliability and performance of your services that impact your critical user journeys and business goals. Success Rate SLOs for APM Services Observability SLOs are based on a Service Level Indicator (SLI), which is a metric that is important to meet for your service or infrastructure. SLIs can be defined on custom metrics and they are delivered out of the box for the success rate of APM services. By choosing a compliance period and a threshold, you can define a target that should be achieved for your service. Simple alerting will help you notify the right people when the error budget is being consumed too quickly or when you have missed your SLO target.  There are three ways to alert on SLOs in Observability Cloud: Breach Events - The SLO target has been missed for the compliance period. Best as a final indicator that reliability or performance should be prioritized. Budget Events - There may not be enough error budget remaining in this compliance period. Best for simple understanding of the alerting condition. Burn Events - The recent burn rate indicates a serious incident that could impact your SLO target. Best for proactive teams that want to leverage intelligent alerting. In addition to SLO alerting, the new experience features an intuitive UX highlighting recent status to help you find the right SLO target and view the time windows where the SLO status was impacted.  Accessing SLOs SLO management is included as part of the subscription for all Splunk Observability Cloud customers, for both suite and a la carte, so you can access today. There are no additional costs for this feature. Explore our documentation to learn more, and start using SLOs in Splunk Observability Cloud today. ... View more

Splunk Observability Cloud’s OpenTelemetry Insights page is now available for your GCP and Azure hosts to give you a more comprehensive view of your artifacts that capture metrics, traces and logs, as well as the state of the integration sources. This view is already available for AWS EC2 hosts.  The OpenTelemetry insights page, accessed via the Data Management module, gives users a complete view of the host’s inventory, including:  A full list of instances The deployment status of the OpenTelemetry Collector for each instance The version.  With this new level of insight into your data pipeline, you can better understand which parts of your applications and infrastructure still need to be instrumented, improve tracking of the deployment of their agents, and control versioning.  Try it today! ... View more

We’ve released new enhancements to the navigators within Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring (IM) to give users greater context and flexibility as they expand visibility and troubleshoot across their environments. What’s New? Navigator Customization  This new capability allows Observability Cloud admins to customize the dashboards displayed for a given IM navigator so users can quickly extend the built-in content to align with their unique business needs. Prior to this release, the IM navigators only linked to the standard built-in dashboards, which couldn’t be easily updated to show metrics that were most relevant to your business. Now admins can select the new “Manage navigator dashboards” option from the navigator screen in the UI to open the navigator settings view where they’ll be able to configure the dashboards displayed for that navigator, including:  Adding custom dashboards Hiding a built-in dashboard and  Reordering the dashboards in the navigator  Learn more >   Log Charts in Navigators Building on our recent enhancements to the Kubernetes navigator, this release delivers in-context troubleshooting with the logs-in-dashboards integration. With Kubernetes navigator, engineers get immediate visibility to their Kubernetes environment with automatic discovery and instrumentation through auto-telemetry. Direct integration of logs provides users with complete, in-place views of related data from logs to metrics to traces so you can easily monitor availability and troubleshoot problems without context switching. Learn more >  ... View more

We’ve enabled AWS PrivateLink for Observability Cloud, giving you an additional inbound connection to send metrics, traces, and API service data to the platform. With PrivateLink, you can now securely send your data directly to the Observability ingest endpoint from your AWS environment. This is the best practice for secure service connections in AWS so you can prevent your sensitive data from traversing the internet. Key Benefits  Utilizing AWS PrivateLink helps improve your security posture so you can maintain regulatory compliance when you need to prevent sensitive data from traversing the internet. Additionally, sending data directly will allow you to save on data transfer costs.  Getting Started To get started, you’d contact the Splunk Sales Engineer aligned to your team and provide a few details, including your AWS Account ID, the AWS Region and VPC endpoint ID. The Splunk team will do the rest to configure your PrivateLink. Splunk Observability Cloud’s PrivateLink is enabled on ALL AWS realms and is limited to connectors in the same AWS region.  Read the product documentation to learn more. ... View more

Splunk provides enhanced visibility and faster troubleshooting for your Kubernetes environments with the latest enhancements to the Kubernetes navigator. The Kubernetes navigator enables engineering teams to quickly visualize and monitor the performance of their Kubernetes deployments with an easy-to-use, out-of-the-box UI that automatically discovers Kubernetes components and containerized services in their environment.  Read the product documentation to learn more. What’s New? The latest enhancements deliver: More intuitive navigation: New main-panel dashboards with more detailed built-in charts, multiple tabs, and breadcrumb trail to easily pivot to interdependencies without context switching. Kubernetes navigator node details Deeper visibility: New workload heatmap view provides developers with a graphical interface to identify outlier conditions in their pods and containers. Expanded Control Plane views for enhanced visibility into the performance of services supporting Kubernetes workloads. Kubernetes navigator workload heatmap Accelerated troubleshooting: Fully discovered property metadata, accelerated detector creation, direct linking to detector state, and advanced chart configurations to speed up issue detection and resolution. Kubernetes navigator Autodetect The Kubernetes navigator is one of the OOTB navigators in Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring. A navigator is a set of screens that allow users to orient and explore their tech stack. Start exploring today! ... View more

Expanded Browser Test settings are now available in Splunk Synthetic Monitoring within Splunk Observability Cloud. Whether you want to masquerade as a specific device or prevent a marketing modal from appearing randomly during a test, Synthetics users often have specific requirements for browser instrumentation for testing. With this release, Synthetics within Observability Cloud users can customize how they instrument browsers for browser tests to more accurately replicate the user experience and business-critical workflows they hope to measure. Advanced Settings Available in the New UI Advanced Settings for Browser Tests Users can now configure the following settings via the API or UI for browser tests. Cookies - Set cookies by adding the name, value, domain/host, and optional path to prevent popup modals from randomly appearing so tests can run to completion without interruption. Custom Headers - For the custom headers setting, you can select from a list of available headers or define a unique custom header to add to test workflows. SSL/TLS Validation - Enforce TLS/SSL validation is applied by default, which can cause tests to fail if host certificates are invalid or expired. With this configuration, you can deselect this option. Host Overrides - Users can add Host Override rules to reroute requests from one host to another. This is helpful when testing an existing production site against page resources loaded from a development site or a specific CDN edge node.  User Agent - With this configuration, you can specify the device type for your browser tests by selecting the default option or adding a custom User-Agent string so you can measure how different device types impact page rendering. Authentication - You can add username and password information to the browser to test workflows that require authentication. Review the product documentation to learn more! Splunk Synthetic Monitoring Within Splunk Observability Cloud Splunk Synthetic Monitoring within Splunk Observability Cloud offers customers a comprehensive solution for their observability practice allowing IT and engineering teams to proactively detect issues impacting web and API performance and end-user experience, and troubleshoot and remediate issues in the web browser, server, or third-party dependencies—all within a single UI. Splunk’s standalone Synthetic Monitoring offering, formerly known as Rigor, is still available. We will continue to migrate all the features and capabilities to the new UI. Interested in testing out advanced settings for browser tests? Sign up for a free trial today! — Teneil Lawrence, Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) Product Marketing ... View more