Splunk this week announced a new Service Inventory product that uses OpenTelemetry to offer a comprehensive view into service instrumentation, which the observability company says will solve a critical pain point in modern infrastructure monitoring by providing visibility across cloud and Kubernetes environments.
Splunk’s Service Inventory helps organizations identify gaps in their observability configuration, validate that all services are properly instrumented, and ensure they are collecting data from every critical component of their infrastructure. By using OpenTelemetry, Splunk is providing a vendor-neutral approach to collecting telemetry data across different systems and services, offering customers a more flexible, interoperable solution that isn’t locked into proprietary agents, the company says.
Splunk is a major contributor to the OpenTelemetry project and uses OpenTelemetry natively in its Observability Cloud offering. This allows for automatic configuration, easier deployment, and more comprehensive monitoring across complex cloud environments, according to the company.
“One of the challenges that people sometimes have with OpenTelemetry is their ability to configure it, validate where it has been deployed, if it’s running properly, if it’s configured properly, and critically, if there is anywhere they haven’t yet deployed it where they need to go actually get that done,” says Morgan McLean, OpenTelemetry co-founder and senior director of product management for Splunk Observability Cloud.
Splunk’s new Service Inventory addresses the challenges of large-scale observability by reducing manual configuration, simplifying instrumentation, and giving customers more transparency and control of their observability processes. The new capabilities in Service Inventory:
- Provide end-to-end visibility, which automatically detects all third-party applications, like databases and message queues.
- Offer configuration guides, which provide step-by-step recommendations for OpenTelemetry setup.
- Identify and resolve visibility gaps, which highlights missing instrumentation, letting enterprises proactively address blind spots across their infrastructure.
With this release, Splunk also enhances its Kubernetes monitoring and troubleshooting capabilities to help teams more quickly detect and resolve issues within Kubernetes clusters. Splunk is also rolling out OpenTelemetry Python 2.0 and Node.js 3.0, which the company says will deliver greater flexibility and improved performance for cloud-native applications.
“OpenTelemetry is rapidly becoming the industry standard for building an effective observability practice, but complex instrumentation remains a significant barrier. Splunk’s latest innovations have the potential to make its adoption more seamless than ever,” Archana Venkatraman, Senior Research Director of Cloud Data Management at IDC Europe, said in a statement. “Cloud-native and Kubernetes strategies are becoming mainstream, requiring enterprise-grade management. Amid this, by automating instrumentation and deepening Kubernetes troubleshooting, Splunk continues to make OpenTelemetry a practical and powerful solution for digital enterprises.”
Splunk Service Inventory and the company’s Kubernetes troubleshooting enhancements and expanded OpenTelemetry language support are available globally for all Splunk Observability Cloud customers.