By Splunk June 22, 2021
We at Splunk know that data drives better decisions. We see this with customers, and we live it every day in our own operations within Splunk. Running large cloud services across multiple cloud providers, we have to manage data policies and data processing needs against an increasing set of use cases, as well as the backdrop of regulatory, privacy and security frameworks. Just today we announced the Splunk Security Cloud, and all practitioners, not just those in security, know that the challenge of working with data is that while some of your data is of extremely high value, you often don’t know the value of the rest of your data until you need it.
While data is critical to success, you have to also be practical about cost as we all have budgets to manage. This is why I am thrilled about our innovations in pricing and packaging, particularly Workload Pricing.
Workload Pricing gives Splunk customers ultimate flexibility and control over their data and cost. You pay not for all the data you have, but for what you use Splunk to do with that data. You’re charged by the resources consumed for search, analytics and other data processing workloads rather than the data volume ingested. You’re charged not for having data, but for the work you do to draw meaningful insights from it.
"Workload Pricing directly aligns to value."
Flexibility in Data Types, Data Volumes and Data Value
For some data, the high value is immediately clear. Security and customer / sales data are easy examples. But what about all your other data? Some of the data appears to be low value — at least for now — and you’re not even sure what value other data may have. Along with varying values of data, there can be unexpected surges of data based on what’s happening with your business at a given moment. Workload Pricing gives you flexibility over the types, volume and value of data you process.
With resource-based Workload Pricing, customers can turn more dark data into action — regardless of data volume. This means more flexibility and eliminates the need to know up front the value of your data or exactly how you will use it.
Control and Automated Flexibility in Resource Usage
Workload Pricing provides a license model that adapts to a wide range of use cases. Every day is different, and as incidents or business needs arise, you need control and flexibility in how you use your solutions. From continuous monitoring of the environment to ad hoc searches in another environment, or maybe just simple dashboards and monitoring, the system dynamically applies your resources.
The movement to this pricing model was coupled with the release of several capabilities that enabled better reporting and management of a customer tenant’s resource utilization. It starts with Workload Management, a rich set of capabilities that provide fine-grained, rules-based control of resource prioritization. This rule-based framework lets you set rules that automatically manage your system resources. One of the key features here is the ability to specify rules for system prioritization. You can prioritize critical searches and flexibly manage workloads during peak / off-peak times using schedule-based rules. You can place searches in different pools and also provide granular access controls to certain users, so they have the ability to choose their own workload pools. In addition, rich monitoring capabilities allow you to track utilization and fine-tune the resource allocations. Workload Management gives you full control to allocate Splunk resources more precisely to serve your internal business requirements without over-provisioning the capacity.
Customers have far more control of how they utilize their resources, to thus do more for less. Visibility of resource utilization also comes in the form of Splunk's cloud monitoring console, which provides full visibility into resource consumption as well as detailed information on charge-back needs for large enterprises.
Flexible Unit of Measure for New Platform Capabilities
Without a doubt, your operating environment and analytical, monitoring and detection use cases are changing and will continue to change over time. You may be navigating changes with your OS substrate, from bare metal, to VMs, containers and serverless. Ultimately what you do with your data will also change. The need to be nimble is key. Today you may leverage Splunk Cloud Platform to massively ingest and search event data. Tomorrow, you might choose to do federated querying of data in S3, or machine learning, and the day after that, you might need it for streaming analytics.
As Splunk releases more cloud-based platform services, our Workload Pricing allows you to use the entitlement you’ve already purchased to take advantage of each new innovation. When we initially launched Workload Pricing, it began as a metric for only data ingest and search capabilities. Recently, with the launch of our streaming services in Splunk Cloud Platform, our workload customers can simply leverage streaming analytics without another procurement cycle. The system will tell you the aggregate resource usage across the services you are using.
Investing in Data Value
The Workload Pricing model truly unlocks the power of the Splunk Cloud Platform. Your investments in Splunk are aligned with the resources you use to deliver value. It gives you the flexibility to ingest a lot more data up front and leaves the door open to explore different use cases without worrying about having to pay per gigabyte. Finally, the fact that you can monitor and manage your workload usage through the Cloud Management Console and Workload Management capabilities brings it all together.
Check out our new pricing content, talk to our sales team, and get excited about the changes to Splunk’s packaging and pricing that make it easier to tackle not just security, but all your data problems.
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Thanks!
Sendur Sellakumar