Splunk Dashboards & UI in the New Splunk Developer Cloud (SDC) Beta

At .conf18 last week, we announced the beta release of the new Splunk Developer Cloud (SDC), a truly cloud-native, services-based platform for large-scale data ingest and analytics. As a developer platform, SDC provides a full suite of services through RESTful APIs, SDKs, as well as UI component libraries to enable developers to quickly onboard and build custom applications.

If you’re a developer building an application that leverages machine data, you can now tap into that value without having to install and administer your own Splunk instance(s). There’s no need to operate and manage a complex distributed system, there’s a consistent developer experience across the platform, and scaling is easier than ever.

Beyond administrative benefits, the SDC beta release provides developers with modern and flexible dashboarding and UI libraries. With the Splunk Dashboard framework, developers can quickly transform their data into actionable insights. With the Splunk UI framework, developers can build almost any visualization into their apps utilizing a modern React-based framework.

Both frameworks are designed from the ground up to make it faster and easier to build truly beautiful dashboards.

The dashboard from the keynote demo highlights a few of these key enhancements:

• Advanced Layouts – Absolute and Grid supported out of the box 
• Background Image – Customized look and feel for the canvas
• Modularity – Both frameworks are available as JavaScript components and can be embedded in a React single page app
• Extensibility – Custom search modal and custom master-detail side panel 
• Portability – Dashboards are stored as JSON files that can be easily imported/exported 
• ...and more!
   

Our overarching goals for the new dashboarding and UI frameworks are to:

1. Minimize the time to create dashboards as visually compelling as the Buttercup Games keynote demo
2. Provide a consistent, environment-agnostic dashboard development and consumption experience
    

We’re excited to add even more bells and whistles to the frameworks during the SDC beta period and ultimately bring that same dashboarding experience on-premises.

So that’s our promise to you: As we enrich the new framework with a robust editing experience and to address increasingly complex visualizations, we won’t lose sight of minimizing the time required to get a polished dashboard out the door. We will stay focused on making it as simple as possible to build and share dashboards as captivating as the data underpinning them.

If you’re a developer that’d like to get started building apps that can leverage the power of Splunk without having to disentangle an index cluster from a search head cluster and avoid namespace collisions on searches, I encourage you to apply for the SDC preview program.

To learn more about the new dashboarding & UI frameworks, watch my colleague Nachiket Mistry’s deep-dive session from .conf18, "Dashboards and Analytics UI Components for Developers in Splunk Developer Cloud."

Keep an eye on this blog over the next couple weeks. During the pre-release period, we partnered with NetMotion Software and Hurricane Labs. Both of these teams built SDC apps that utilize the new dashboarding framework and will be providing deeper dives into their development experience in coming posts.

Splunk on!

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Thanks!
Miranda Luna