By Splunk October 06, 2015
I imagine most of you have seen the 2013 Marvel movie, Thor. If not, I highly recommend it, where the Asgardian god of thunder saves the Earth using an enchanted, magical hammer. The movie has a very obvious storyline – triumph of good over evil – but what caught my attention was a reference to a quote by the British science-fiction writer, Sir Arthur Charles Clarke – “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
This quote really got me thinking. I am a product marketing manager for Splunk Cloud, which is hosted on AWS. As part of my job, I work very closely with various AWS technologies and customer requirements around cloud adoption. For instance, in the AWS world, a primary objective of IT administrators, engineers and devops is to design and maintain AWS environments that provide security, reliability and transparency. But to achieve this nirvana, do they really need magic?
Thankfully, the answer is NO! Because they have Splunk! At Splunk, we focus on providing our customers with the technology (though it might seem like magic J) they need to move their mission-critical workloads to AWS with agility, security and confidence.
Today, we are happy to announce that we have not only updated our Splunk App for AWS but also added many advanced features to it. This app integrates with AWS CloudTrail, AWS Config, Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon VPC Flow Logs, Amazon S3 and billing reports provided by the Splunk Add-on for Amazon Web Services. With this app, you can:
- Use the Topology dashboard to gain a unified view of your AWS infrastructure
Let’s do a show of hands – How many of you have wanted a consolidated way to view the relationships between your EC2 instances, VPCs, network interfaces and security groups, preferably in a single pane? The new topology dashboard provides a birds-eye view of all current and historical AWS components so you don’t have to manually switch between multiple AWS services and disconnected dashboards.
I am sure Thor would have liked to use this screen to view his Asgardian resources!
- Easily troubleshoot issues with your Amazon VPC configurations and maintain uptime
Have you ever wondered if there is an intuitive way to visualize and identify security threats such as port-sniffing activities to and from network interfaces into your VPCs? Well, now there is. You can use the pre-built version of our VPC dashboards or easily configure new dashboards to troubleshoot workflows and determine if authorized traffic is reaching an instance. Diagnosing overly restrictive/permissive security group rules has never been so simple!
- Getting better visibility and security into your AWS components
Wish you could have comprehensive real-time visibility so your security controls are based on what you see and not on what you can’t see? The Splunk App for AWS leverages AWS CloudTrail data so you can analyze user activity and find out who accessed what resources and at what point in time. Getting insights into your security behavior couldn’t get easier!
- Quickly track inadvertent changes to your AWS resources to minimize unnecessary impact
As the guards to the AWS fortress, you need to make sure your users get a service that is up all the time. Use AWS Config to analyze your diverse AWS resources and their configurations so you can monitor the states and relationships of your resources in real-time. The dashboard also helps to manage dependencies between resources and quickly figure out how a change to one resource impacts the behavior of another. Isn’t it great that you don’t need an Asgardian to protect your AWS fortress?
For more details on our Cloud Solutions, please go here. Also, we are always excited to hear from our customers. Please leave me any questions or feedback in the comment section below!
And yes, to conclude, this is the goodness of Splunk — you don’t need magic!
We’re attending AWS re:Invent all week. To learn more about Splunk at the conference, check out our full theater schedule for booth #400.
Thanks,
Almitra
Almitra Karnik
Sr. Product Marketing Manager, Cloud Solutions
Splunk Inc.
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Thanks!
Almitra Karnik