Server Monitoring Without Limits: 100 Servers for Free in Splunk Insights for Infrastructure

UPDATED 6/26/2020: Splunk Insights for AWS Cloud Monitoring and Splunk Insights for Infrastructure will formally reach end-of-life on June 30, 2020. Customers who have already purchased Insights will continue to have support and maintenance per standard support terms for the remainder of contractual commitments. To learn more, read our blog here.

The introductory tier of Splunk Insights for Infrastructure provides new Splunk users a significant amount of legroom to both try it out and use it in their production environments. As of the initial release of Splunk Insights for Infrastructure, users can begin using the product with no feature restrictions for up to 200GB of total ingested data.

So what exactly does this mean? It means that whether you're ingesting metrics, logs or both, you have up to 200GB of total data you can retain before hitting any limits on your total data storage. What makes this even better is that we only count what's stored after Splunk’s on-disk compression kicks in.

In many cases, compression can reduce data size by up to 50 percent—potentially getting 400GB of data with no product restrictions for free! Then you can add more data retention, or storage, in 50GB blocks for $75/GB per year up to an additional 600GB (for 800GB total).

Here’s an easy table to help you with the offering:

^{(All prices are annual)}

Let’s break down what all of this means...

Well, let's say you have 100 Linux hosts. We’ve run the nuMBers and a single Linux host with 100 measurements being collected every 60 seconds amounts to about 20MB of uncompressed data a day. (Note: this may change depending on the amount of dimensions you add to your data.)

After compression, we’re looking at about 10MB/day per host.

If you collect only metric data for performance and availability monitoring for these 100 hosts, you will go ~200 days before you reach your metric retention limit. After you reach the 200GB storage limit, the oldest data will be purged from the system as new data rolls in. If you're as big a fan of accounting as I am, this method is known as FIFO—or first in first out. It should be noted that a passion for accounting is not a choice, but a destiny. I digress...

The licensing page of Splunk Insights for Infrastructure is there to help you determining how much data you are collecting and of what type. This is particularly important as you begin adding log data, which can be explosive depending on your sources.

^{(The licensing page shows you how much storage you’ve used, your uncompressed daily ingestion broken down by data source and—once enough data has been accumulated—how many days of data will be available in the app. You can also upload a new license for the Insight from this screen.)}

A good way to get started and to understand your data needs is to onboard a dozen or so servers; even if you’re bringing 600MBs of logs a day, you’ll be able to safely measure your storage needs before deciding which tier of Splunk Insights for Infrastructure you need.

In this case, those 12 servers are generating 20MB of metric data and 600MB of log data a day. Without spending a dime, you'll have 54 days of data for monitoring, alerting and investigation.

It’s a great time to get started with Splunk for monitoring your cloud and on-prem infrastructure. Monitor AWS instances, Linux hosts and Windows hosts all in one product with a generous introductory offer of 200GB of free data.

If you are having trouble deciding which version of Splunk Insights for Infrastructure is right for you and your team's needs, check out my "Splunk Insights or Splunk App for Infrastructure: What’s Right for Me?" blog post (for those who need a bigger data platform).

Even with the best of solutions, trial periods and limits force new users to make buying decisions before they're ready or before understanding their needs. Not so with Splunk Insights for Infrastructure—there's no cap on the number of servers or users you can onboard, and there isn’t a time bomb waiting to force you to move into a paid product.

We also don’t make you do the math of pricing between metrics and logs; in the end, it’s all just data.

When you’re ready to get more data and support, we’re here; and when you’re ready to move to Splunk Enterprise and unlock over 1,000 apps and integrations to experience the ultimate power of Splunk, we have teams ready to help you make the move.

All that’s left is one quick download!

So what are you waiting for? Start monitoring your hybrid IT stack for free with Splunk Insights for Infrastructure.