Splunk Advances Future of Observability with OpenTelemetry Donations

SAN FRANCISCO – October 11, 2021 – KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America – Splunk Inc. (NASDAQ: SPLK), a data platform leader, today announced the donation of the extended Berkeley packet filter (eBPF) collector to OpenTelemetry, extending the type and scope of observability data collected for modern, cloud-based applications to include network telemetry. Splunk’s OpenTelemetry donation further reinforces its commitment to democratizing how data is collected from infrastructures and applications, furthering the belief that the value of observability is what customers get out of their data, not how it is gathered. OpenTelemetry provides an open standards approach for collecting data, giving IT and DevOps teams more freedom and flexibility to accelerate their digital transformation journeys.

A lack of sufficient network visibility across organizations can impact cloud applications and distributed microservices, cause connectivity issues in cloud providers, lead to outages in managed services and more. Splunk’s donation of the eBPF Collector to OpenTelemetry creates an accurate, complete model of service dependencies and service health by tracking network connections from every container transparently. This in turn allows organizations to measure the impact of infrastructure and cloud network problems on distributed services within seconds, significantly decreasing mean-time-to-detection and improving team productivity.

“At a time where digital experiences are more important than ever, OpenTelemetry is extremely powerful in working to accelerate the implementation of observability and deliver results with cloud applications, many of which directly impact business performance,” said Spiros Xanthos, VP of Product Management, Observability and IT Operations, Splunk. “Splunk’s donation of the eBPF Collector to OpenTelemetry is yet another example of our continued efforts to democratize data for our customers and partners, giving them complete control over their most valuable asset, their data, as we work to make OpenTelemetry an industry standard.”

The eBPF Collector generates high-fidelity network telemetry that recognizes all service-to-service interactions, without sampling or service changes. It uses extended Berkeley packet filter technology and provides organizations with access to a wide range of application and kernel telemetry that was previously unavailable. The eBPF Collector also provides the OpenTelemetry community with a platform to collect this data in real-time, with high-granularity and extremely low impact to user workloads.

Splunk Fosters Open Source Ecosystem with Continued Commitments

Splunk is committed to the value of open source and has partnered with numerous vendors to extend the vision of OpenTelemetry in the industry. Google Cloud recently announced that they donated Sqlcommenter to OpenTelemetry, allowing application-focused database observability with open standards and Splunk and other partners were key contributors in shaping the standard. Sqlcommenter simplifies the process of correlating slow queries with source code and provides insights into backend database performance. The merging of Sqlcommenter to OpenTelemetry also means that Splunk observability customers can further empower developers with application-centric database monitoring, improving visibility into the performance of applications and end user experiences.

“We believe that a healthy observability ecosystem serves our customers and partners well and this is reflected in our continued commitment to open-source initiatives,” said Andi Gutmans, GM and VP of Engineering, Databases, Google Cloud. “With this donation of Sqlcommenter to OpenTelemetry, Google Cloud and Splunk are excited to partner together to shape the future of open database telemetry. Now, developers can easily get application-centric database observability with their favorite tools.”

As a founding member and the No. 1 contributor to the OpenTelemetry project, Splunk has provided over 64,000 contributions to OpenTelemetry. Splunk has optimized and designed its observability portfolio to consume and manage OpenTelemetry data at scale, offering customers optimal flexibility in collecting data for visibility into their infrastructures, applications and users.

Splunk is also a Gold member of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and is committed to the innovative drive and rapid expansion of the open source community. Splunk’s continued CNCF contributions include the donation of the SignalFx Smart Agent and Smart Gateway to the OpenTelemetry project, as well as other projects like Cortex and Prometheus, Envoy, Fluentd and more.

For more information on OpenTelemetry and Splunk’s observability portfolio, visit the Splunk website.