Recently, Johnvey Hwang wrote a post called Standing on Our Own Platform. He was the first one at Splunk to break the ice and use the “P” word. Now it’s out there. What do we see when we stand on our own platform? While only you and the future will tell us — there are a few things we hope to see on the horizon.

First, it’s our belief there’s a lot of money out there wasted on point products for managing networks, servers, applications … even security. A lot of these systems redundantly collect, transmit and store much of the same machine generated data. Think of the network, storage and administration resources duplicated on all this stuff. By providing a platform where the same IT data can be managed once, resources can be freed for other projects.

Second, none of these products work together. If you’re running a network manager to collect and look at SNMP and netflow data you know it doesn’t integrate with your log management system and of course neither talks to your SIEM, SOA, virtualization or application framework monitoring consoles. Building a dense index of data from all of these tools enables correlation across all your silos of instrumentation.