This article is more than 1 year old

Splunk and New Relic say they're now friends with benefits

Developer data meets operations data for – hey presto! – DevOps dashboards

Operations people are often quite fond of Splunk, because it gives them bucketloads of useful data about the performance of the kit they tend. Developers are often quite fond of New Relic, because it gives them bucketloads of useful data about the performance of the code they tend, and its impact on the user experience.

So what if they two companies decided that instead of existing in parallel streams, they teamed up to share data so that ops people or developers – or even DevOps people – could pipe data between the two companies' wares?

They've only gone and done it, haven't they?

Both companies are modern enough to have equipped their products with APIs, but both admitted to The Register that while those APIs are clever and keen, it can take a while to get them to work. The integration between the companies means they've each created assets they say should mean it takes mere minutes to take data from one application and pipe it into dashboards run by the other.

Data can flow either way: you could publish Splunk data in New Relic or go the other way.

Both companies seem to think their respective users will enjoy the wider view of their operations that merging the two data sources affords, as a server wobble can impact customer experience as much as buggy code. Seeing both types of incident in one place, and being able to organise appropriate responses, is thought to be a useful way of running online services. It's also hoped that sharing data from disparate tools elevates admins from break-fix into proactive troubleshooting of things that might make an application less appetising to end-users.

The Register has seen this movie before, back in the mid-1990s when enterprise management frameworks promised to offer business-process-centric views of software and hardware. But those tools never quite escaped from a deserved reputation for long, complex, costly and sometimes futile implementation processes.

New Relic and Splunk both feel they're agile and/or modern enough, and their pre-rolled API-wheel-greasers sufficiently well built, that those problems won't repeat. ®

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