Splunk this week made a bevy of updates to its observability platforms including the addition of a revamped user interface that provides a more consistent experience across Splunk Cloud and Splunk AppDynamics.

In addition, there is now deeper integration between the platforms made possible by Log Observer Connect for Splunk AppDynamics, deeper linking and a single sign-on capability.

Finally, the Splunk Observability Cloud has been updated to provide deeper visibility into Kubernetes clusters along with an update to Tag Spotlight capability that provides a more intuitive understanding of issues for IT operations teams.

Splunk Field CTO Cory Minton said Splunk since being acquired by Cisco has been working to integrate the AppDynamics platform with multiple Splunk observability platforms. Cisco acquired AppDynamics in 2017 and is now being advanced within the Splunk arm of Cisco.

Rather than having one single platform, Splunk is working to make it simpler for the various teams with an IT organization that are using these platforms to collaborate, said Minton. An IT service management (ITSM) team that uses the core Splunk platform to troubleshoot an infrastructure should be able to easily share insights with an application development team that is using AppDynamics to manage the software development lifecycle, (SDLC), said Minton.

As part of that effort, Splunk is making it possible to analyze data even if it has not been indexed, he added. That federated ability to process data both internally and externally will foster deeper levels of collaboration across IT teams by ensuring the right data is made available at the right time, said Minton.

Splunk is also investing in generative artificial intelligence (AI) to make its platforms more accessible by, for example, being able to use natural language to query data, he noted. The overall goal is to extract more signal for all the data being generated by applications, said Minton.

Mitch Ashley, vice president and practice lead for DevOps and application development at The Futurum Group, said it’s clear AppDynamics is now being pulled into the Splunk technology ecosystem in a way that makes workflows and processes seamless.

Each IT organization will need to decide for itself to what degree to meld those workflows. However, with the rise of platform engineering, more organizations are looking for ways to streamline the management of IT operations. A Techstrong Research survey finds that 61% of respondents work for organizations that are already applying platform engineering principles across all or some element of their IT operations. Improving developer productivity (59%), the need for standardization of configurations (58%), reducing costs (51%), decreasing the increased complexity of modern applications (49%) and improving security (48%) as the primary drivers of adoption, the survey finds.

Observability, of course, is a core tenet of DevOps and an essential element of any platform engineering strategy. The challenge, as always, is finding a way to collect and process all the telemetry data generated by applications as efficiently as possible. Otherwise, the cost of observability starts to reach a level that quickly becomes unsustainable for many organizations.