Splunk IT Essentials Work: A Centralized App for All Things ITOps

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By Subu Baskaran April 12, 2021

Splunkbase apps are very popular among IT administrators and provide out-of-the-box content for different infrastructure types such as Windows, Unix, VMware, and AWS. As customers expanded their need for more infrastructure types, they historically had to manage and leverage multiple apps. We have now introduced IT Essentials Work, one centralized app that provides a simpler way to monitor and troubleshoot across different infrastructure types without having to install and maintain different apps.

In this blog post, we will focus on how customers can use IT Essentials Work for the most common IT operations use cases in Splunk. Prior to launching IT Essentials Work, Splunk has offered multiple Splunkbase apps to manage IT infrastructure, and customers have had to maintain each of these apps individually. This approach created silos and wouldn't provide full context across an IT environment (especially when troubleshooting).

^{Splunk App for VMWare dashboard}

Break Down Silos

IT Essentials Work will help break these silos. With out of the box host troubleshooting capabilities for many infrastructure types such as Linux, Windows, AWS and VMware, customers can get started in minutes. This allows customers to monitor many different infrastructure types (or 'entity types') side by side, helping teams quickly analyze the performance of a host in context with databases, storage, or a server running inside the host. We believe this puts the power in the hands of the administrator and the end-users to get a sense of infrastructure performance without having to switch between different apps.

^{Infrastructure Overview in IT Essentials Work and IT Service Intelligence (ITSI)}>

While we have supported host-level monitoring for a while, we will migrate the rest of the dashboards from Splunk App for LinuxUnix, Splunk App for Windows Infrastructure, Splunk App for Infrastructure, Splunk App for Microsoft Exchange, and Splunk App for NetApp ONTAP into IT Essentials Work. The metrics-to-log correlation at a VM or an OS-level gives the user a faster troubleshooting experience, reducing mean time to failure. Finally, IT administrators can set up alerts at a specific infrastructure level and analyze alerts across different infrastructure types.

How Can I Access The Dashboards?

The content from the different apps will be available directly in IT Essentials Work. Customers can access data by installing the Splunk App for Content Packs. Using in-product guidance, IT Essentials Work or IT Service Intelligence (ITSI) customers can consume content for different IT Ops use cases such as Unix/Linux, Windows, AWS, VMware, Exchange and NetApp. In addition to using the out of the box dashboards in the dashboards menu, entities and entity types can also be assigned and used for an individual component such as an EC2 instance or a Linux OS. More information regarding entity types can be found here.

^{Available dashboards in IT Essentials Work}

In addition to the dashboards from Splunk App for Content Packs, IT Service Intelligence (ITSI) customers can install additional content packs that provide out-of-the-box KPI base searches, service templates and Glass Tables.

Executive Visibility

Apart from providing end-to-end visibility at the infrastructure level, IT Essentials Work also shares the same code base with IT Service Intelligence (ITSI), our premium analytics solution, to facilitate an easy upgrade.

^{Service Analyzer view in ITSI}

ITSI leverages the infrastructure data along with other business-related data so administrators can build executive dashboards for real-time visibility across business and infrastructure performance.

With its Event Analytics features, ITSI can intelligently group, mute and route alerts generated in IT Essentials Work for efficient triage and troubleshooting.

Next Steps

On April 30, 2021, we will end the sale of the Splunk App for Exchange and Splunk App for VMware. We will be archiving the Splunk App for LinuxUnix, Splunk App for Infrastructure, Splunk App for Windows Infrastructure, Splunk App for NetApp Data ONTAP and Splunk App for AWS, and they will cease to be available for download from Splunkbase. As an alternative, customers can choose to leverage the infrastructure content within IT Essentials Work 4.9 or ITSI 4.9 (available early May), based on their requirements. Existing support contracts will be honored until their end date providing sufficient time to migrate to the new experience.

Customers that manage Splunk in their data centers can download IT Essentials Work for free from Splunkbase. Customers that use Splunk Cloud can request support-assisted installation for IT Essentials Work through the ticketing workflow. Splunk sales and customer success teams can help determine whether IT Essentials Work or ITSI is the right option moving forward.

Summary

This is an exciting change as we are moving towards a simple yet powerful consolidated user experience for IT administrators and Splunk users. We understand how much the features from these apps are important for our customers so we have built the new app with customer experience in mind. With a simple data ingestion mechanism and an easy configuration experience, we expect customers to benefit from IT Essentials Work to monitor across different infrastructure types.