The Incredible Hunk – Splunk Analytics for Hadoop

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Splunk recently announced a new offering, called Hunk. This is essentially a tool that allows for the exploration, analysis and visualisation of data in Hadoop, using the powerful Splunk interface and search engine common to their Splunk Enterprise offering. Namely, the features listed include:

  • Splunk Virtual Indexing – Explore, analyze and visualize data across multiple Hadoop distributions as if it were stored in a Splunk index.
  • Easy to Deploy and Drive Fast Value – Simply point Hunk at your Hadoop cluster and start exploring data immediately.
  • Interactive Analysis of Data in Hadoop – Drive deep analysis, pattern detection and find anomalies across terabytes and petabytes of data. Correlate data to spot trends and identify patterns of interest.
  • Report on and visualize data in Hadoop – build advanced graphs and charts on the fly and share them with others.

This new offering really helps open up Splunk to the Hadoop crowd. There has been integration between Splunk and Hadoop for a while, but the functionality was far more limited.

Many people have difficulty getting value out of Hadoop, as it is not the easiest solution to get your head around.

More often than not, Hadoop requires software engineers and possibly data scientists to help analyse the data. The Hunk offering from Splunk has the potential to change that, by making it significantly easier to search and analyse the data in Hadoop.

It’s a great partnership and while we probably would not advocate using Hadoop as a back-end in place of Splunk’s native back-end given a choice, it does offer value to those that might already have their data in Hadoop. It also extends the capabilities of existing Splunk deployments, in that you can now have a hybrid solution, searching and correlating data in both Hadoop and Splunk from a single place. There are several reasons why this may be beneficial, but we will save that for another day.

Splunk made big data analytics and  intelligence available to the masses and this continues in that same vein. This is a great functional addition and only builds more value in the Splunk platform. The video below gives a good overview. If you are interested in knowing more about this solution or Splunk in general, please contact us.

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