Splunk Synthetics in Observability Terraform Provider Released

Less Pointy Clicky, More Doing!

“How do you know your web properties and APIs are up and functioning as expected for users, not just nationally, but across the entire planet?“

Splunk Synthetic Monitoring provides an effective solution to monitor and track the reliability of web properties from locations all over the globe. By generating simulated user or API requests with Splunk Synthetics you’ll quickly be able to measure response times from various locations, devices, and connection types. However, managing these resources manually can be time-consuming and error-prone. That's where the new Splunk Synthetics Terraform provider comes in!

By managing your Splunk Synthetics tests as code with Terraform you can reap the benefits of DevOps and GitOps (and maybe even other buzzwords!) The Splunk Synthetics Terraform Provider allows you to easily create, read, update, and delete any of the tests, variables, or locations in your Splunk Synthetics environment.

There are several benefits to using Terraform to manage your Splunk Synthetics resources:

Benefits of Terraform and Splunk Synthetics 

Monitoring as Code

Managing Splunk Synthetics resources with Terraform enables you to adopt operational best practices such as: version controlling your configuration files, collaborating with your team more easily, and using one set of software development and deployment tools to manage your monitoring infrastructure and your application together.

Faster, More Consistent Provisioning of Configuration

Using Terraform to manage your Splunk Synthetics resources means that you can provision and configure your monitoring resources in a faster, repeatable, consistent way. Using APIs instead of the UI minimizes wasted time clicking (or misclicking), loading, and locating elements in web pages. This can help you to reduce the time required and minimize errors while setting up and configuring your monitoring

Minimize Drift

Managing your configuration as code helps to ensure that your configuration is always up to date and minimize configuration drift. Configuration managed as code creates a default source of truth where the repository containing the code matches reality.

Greater Flexibility

Terraform enables you to manage your monitoring resources with greater flexibility. You can create reusable modules for common configurations, use variables to define configurations for different environments, and automate the configuration of your resources with scripts. Changing your configurations with Terraform is easy and minimizes the amount of UI crawling. This is especially helpful when making copies of checks for different regions or locations. Just cut and paste with a simple modification (or use of a Terraform variable) will get you entirely new sets of resources!

Magnify Your Observability! 

By managing your Splunk Synthetics resources with Terraform, you can integrate your monitoring infrastructure with your existing Splunk Observability tools and workflows. Splunk Synthetics works in conjunction with all other Splunk Observability products! This means that you can easily view and analyze your monitoring data alongside your other metrics, logs, and traces. This unified view of observability data can provide your organization with more complete insight into infrastructure, application, and web property performance. 

Managing your Splunk Synthetics resources with Terraform can provide significant benefits to your organization. By treating your monitoring infrastructure as code, you can achieve faster provisioning, greater flexibility, and better observability. Furthermore, Infrastructure as Code is a widely accepted best practice that can help your organization evolve and improve its DevOps processes and operational rigor. Download the Splunk Synthetics Terraform provider and give it a try to see how Terraform can help you improve your monitoring infrastructure today!

^{Figure 1-1. Creating Splunk Synthetic tests with Terraform is this easy!}

Next Steps

Start managing your Splunk Synthetics and other resources with Terraform! Integrate your monitoring with the rest of your observability toolset. Amplify your existing observability data with Splunk Synthetics and reap the benefits of Configuration as Code!

You can sign up to start a free trial of the Splunk Observability Cloud suite of products including Splunk Synthetics today!