Alliance can help agencies glean more insight from machine data
Connecting state and local government leaders
Pentaho and Splunk offer a unified system that integrates data from a variety of platforms.
Agencies seeking to unlock more value from machine-generated data now have another option.
Pentaho, a provider of big data analytics and data integration software, has joined with Splunk to provide a platform that will let government and business users glean more insights from machine data generated by websites, applications, servers, storage systems, networks, mobile devices and other mechanisms such as system sensors, according to a Pentaho release.
The combined platform, the Pentaho Business Analytics and Splunk Enterprise, will let users analyze and visualize machine data to extract actionable information, according to Eddie White, executive vice president of business development for Penataho.
Splunk Enterprise ingests large volumes of machine data and provides the analytics to make sense of the data in order to pinpoint problems. Meanwhile, Pentaho provides a full big data analytics solution that covers the entire analytic process including data integration, interactive data visualization, exploration and predictive analytics, company officials said. Government agencies now have a unified platform for both data integration and business analytics.
Pentaho connects Splunk Enterprise to relational database management systems, the Hadoop open source framework for processing large datasets, NoSQL databases and enterprise application data, extending analysis of machine-generated data to the business user. Bi-directional integration lets users export machine data from Splunk Enterprise or import data via Pentaho into Splunk software for additional context. Splunk Enterprise’s reporting and visualization capabilities also have been extended with Pentaho’s self serve/ad hoc business analytics capabilities, officials said.
Over the next five years there will be a convergence of machine data and business data, according to Henri van den Bulk, an enterprise architect with Denver Water, which uses Splunk to proactively address IT and application problems. Machine data tells users what is going on while business data provides the context of what is going on, he said.