Enhanced Maintenance Experience in Splunk Cloud Platform

Calling all Splunk Cloud Platform admins! At Splunk, we are constantly working to improve the way we service our customers. We understand that maintenance windows, while necessary, can sometimes be impactful to your operations. That is why we’re excited to announce a significant upgrade to our maintenance experience, designed to provide you with greater control and minimal impact.

A Two-Fold Strategy for Better Maintenance

We are introducing a two-fold approach to enhance your maintenance experience for Splunk Cloud Platform: 

1. Improved Maintenance Experience
2. Zero Downtime Maintenance

Elevating Your Current Maintenance Experience

We recognize that transparency and communication are two of the foundational elements of a smoother maintenance experience. With this in mind, we've made substantial foundational improvements to how we manage and communicate maintenance windows. These features are available for all Splunk Cloud Platform customers with the exception of GovCloud customers at this time:

Historical and Upcoming Maintenance Visibility: As a Splunk Cloud admin, you can now easily view your past and upcoming maintenance windows through the Splunk Cloud Monitoring Console (CMC)  and the Admin Config Service (ACS). Initially focusing on Splunk version upgrades, we will soon extend this visibility in CMC and ACS to all changes that require a maintenance window, whether initiated by Splunk or requested by the customer. This feature allows admins to stay informed and better plan maintenance activities.

^{Past and upcoming maintenance windows in the CMC’s Maintenance Dashboard, with options to configure a global banner for upcoming maintenance}

Self-Service Change Freeze: We recognize that you may have change moratoriums or quiet periods. Did you know that Splunk offers change freezes? As a Splunk Cloud admin, you can now manage critical business periods by requesting to pause changes when needed via CMC and ACS. Review our maintenance policy and admin manual for more information. Also, stay tuned for expanded self-service maintenance scheduling capabilities.

^{Request Change Freeze capability in Cloud Monitoring Console} 

Expanded Communication: We are committed to keeping you informed. Expect timely notices in advance of the maintenance activities initiated by Splunk. Email notifications to operational contacts at both the start and end of downtime during maintenance operations for Splunk version upgrades are on the way. We will provide more details once those are available. As we extend these capabilities to all other maintenance windows, we strive to provide timely and consistent communications for all maintenance activities so you always know what to expect.

Embracing Zero Downtime Maintenance

Our second strategy focuses on reducing the time spent in maintenance windows altogether. We are thrilled to introduce Zero Downtime maintenance:

Maintenance operations with minimal impact: Zero Downtime maintenance operations are performed in the background that will have a minimal impact on data ingestion, login, search, UI, or access to data while the maintenance is in progress. While you may see transient error messages in the UI or a brief period of slow searches, your system will continue to be available. Splunk strives to continually improve underlying operational capabilities to reduce maintenance windows and ensure business continuity. View details here 

Increased transparency: After the completion of Zero Downtime maintenance activities, you will be able to view a comprehensive log of those changes in the  ACS and CMC maintenance dashboard. As we expand this capability over time, you will stay informed about the changes that were carried out in the background, while your environment was still available.

Availability: This feature is available for all Splunk Cloud Platform customers hosted on AWS with the exception of GovCloud customers at this time.

^{Cloud Monitoring Console screenshot showing Zero Downtime changes with customer facing test data}

What This Means For You

With these enhancements, our aim is to provide you with a more transparent and minimally impactful maintenance experience. By improving how we communicate and manage maintenance windows, and by introducing zero downtime maintenance practices, we are strengthening our commitment to your business’s success and continuity.

What we’re introducing now is just the tip of the iceberg and there’s more to come! We believe these changes will significantly improve your experience with Splunk Cloud Platform. As always, we welcome your feedback through Splunk Ideas and are here to support you through these updates. Thank you for your continued trust in Splunk.

Stay tuned for more updates, refer to our Splunk documentation for more details.