Help/Systems Gets Its Splunk On with ‘InterMapper’ Launch
April 9, 2013 Alex Woodie
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IBM i systems management software developer Help/Systems last week unveiled InterMapper App for Splunk Enterprise, a network analytics and visualization tool designed to work with the data collection software from Splunk. Splunk is an up-and-coming company based in San Francisco that develops software for searching, monitoring, and analyzing big data. The company’s main product, also called Splunk, helps organizations to capture, index, and correlate large amounts of data, and use it to develop graphs, reports, alerts, and dashboards, all from a Web-based interface. Help/Systems’ product builds on the core data collection and manipulation capabilities of Splunk by delivering network analytic capabilities, says Help/Systems CEO Janet Dryer. “By correlating InterMapper data with other machine data within Splunk software, you can build a bigger picture of the overall health of the network and isolate problems that may be affecting it,” Dryer says in a press release. “This delivers better visibility into what is really happening on your network, either in real-time or as part of a forensic analysis after an event.” Help/Systems also tapped analyst Jim Frey of Enterprise Management Associates to help explain how its new software fits into the mix. “More and more companies are looking to Splunk as their platform of choice for integrating and correlating a broad range of operational data and generating business insights,” Frey says in the press release. “The InterMapper App for Splunk is a great example of how network analytics, such as real-time network monitoring and status, can be added into the picture, filling an important gap and enabling correlation of infrastructure health and activity with systems, application, service, and transaction viewpoints,” he continues. Help/Systems didn’t build its InterMapper App for Splunk from scratch. Rather, it’s based on the InterMapper product that it obtained with its December acquisition of the UK company Dartware. InterMapper is Dart’s primary product. The InterMapper App for Splunk Enterprise offering provides the capability to utilize InterMapper within Splunk, thereby simplifying user access and enabling InterMapper. Help/Systems offers InterMapper App for Splunk as a free add-on to Splunk. Users can download it from splunk-base.splunk.com/apps/51549/splunk-app-for-network-monitoring-and-mapping. Users must first have Splunk, as well as InterMapper itself, which starts at $295 for monitoring 10 devices. InterMapper runs on Windows, Linux, and Unix servers. In addition to monitoring events generated from these platforms, InterMapper can work with any network-connected device that generates logs in industry standard formats, such as SysLog or SNMP, which could include IBM i servers. Help/Systems has a large base of IBM i customers, so it’s quite likely that it will be trying to sell them its InterMapper products and Splunk add-ons to help them get a handle on network issues.
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