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Splunk Light: An Introduction and Beginner's Guide

Splunk Light was a version of Splunk’s flagship log search and analysis software that launched in 2015, designed specifically for small IT environments. Splunk Light enabled users to gather and correlate date from all types of sources, formats, and locations. In addition to logfile search and analysis, Splunk Light’s alerts and dashboards helped users get started with critical IT monitoring & observability features quickly and easily.  

If you were thinking about trying Splunk Light, you can get all of the benefits of that platform in Splunk Enterprise or Splunk Cloud (depending on your deployment preference).

Splunk Light End-of-Life (EoL)

In March 2020, it was announced that Splunk Light and Splunk Light Cloud would reach End-of-Sale on May 1, 2020 and eventually would reach End-of-Support and End-of-Life. Customers of Splunk Light and Splunk Light Cloud have the option to migrate to Splunk Enterprise.

Per the announcement, the End-of-Life Timetable was as follows:

  • October 21, 2019: New major releases of Splunk Light stopped.
  • April 24, 2020: Splunk Light 7.1.x End-of-Support via official support policy.
  • May 1, 2020: Splunk Light and Splunk Light Cloud End-of-Sale. No new sales or renewals on Splunk Light or Splunk Light Cloud are allowed. Migrations from Splunk Light to Splunk Enterprise can begin. 
  • October 2, 2020: Splunk Light 7.2.x End-of-Support via official support policy
  • April 30, 2021: Migration from Splunk Light to Splunk Enterprise no longer supported. All Splunk Light support and maintenance purchased before May 1, 2020 by perpetual customers expires. 
  • June 4, 2021: End-of-Life for Splunk Light and Splunk Light Cloud. 

Splunk Light vs Splunk Light Cloud

In September of 2015, the cloud service (SaaS) version of Splunk Light was made available. This deployment option included the same benefits of the original on-premises version of Splunk Light, but without the headaches of purchasing, setting up, and maintaining a server.  As mentioned previously, both Splunk Light and Splunk Light Cloud were officially End-of-Life’d in June 2021.

Splunk Light vs Splunk Light Free

There were a variety of differences between Splunk Light and Splunk Light Free. This table elaborates on the differences.

 

Features Splunk Light Free Splunk Light
Daily Indexing Volume Up to 500MB Up to 20GB
Search and Reporting Yes Yes
Dashboards Yes Yes
Alerting No Yes
Accounts 1 Admin Up to 5, Admin and User
Add-ons Yes Yes

Splunk Light vs Splunk Enterprise

Differences between Splunk Light and Splunk Enterprise included:

Features Splunk Enterprise Splunk Light
Maximum daily indexing volume Unlimited 20GB
Maximum users Unlimited 5
Data collection add-ons Yes Yes
Apps Yes No
Monitoring and alerting Yes Yes
Dashboards and reports Yes Yes
Search and analysis Yes Yes
Automatic data enrichment Yes Yes
Anomaly detection Yes Yes
Scalability Unlimited Single Server
Access control Customizable User and Admin only

 

What is Splunk?

This posting is my own and does not necessarily represent Splunk's position, strategies or opinion.

 

Stephen Watts
Posted by

Stephen Watts

Stephen Watts works in growth marketing at Splunk. Stephen holds a degree in Philosophy from Auburn University and is an MSIS candidate at UC Denver. He contributes to a variety of publications including CIO.com, Search Engine Journal, ITSM.Tools, IT Chronicles, DZone, and CompTIA.