Highlights:

  • The new Service Inventory feature identifies third-party apps, guides OpenTelemetry setup, and highlights missing instrumentation to reveal infrastructure blind spots.
  • Splunk is launching OpenTelemetry Python 2.0 and Node.js 3.0 to improve cloud-native application support.

Cisco Systems Inc.’s observability subsidiary, Splunk LLC, unveiled expanded support for OpenTelemetry—an open-source observability framework offering software tools and APIs for collecting and processing telemetry data, including metrics, logs, and traces, to optimize the performance of distributed systems.

Based on its research indicating that nearly 60% of organizations primarily use OpenTelemetry, Splunk has adopted the standard as the foundation of its Observability Cloud. The latest enhancements offer greater infrastructure visibility, advanced troubleshooting features for the Kubernetes orchestrator managing software containers and expanded support for the automatic setup of OpenTelemetry instrumentation.

The new Service Inventory feature automatically identifies all third-party applications, offers step-by-step guidance for OpenTelemetry setup, and highlights missing instrumentation, making it easier to detect infrastructure blind spots.

Morgan McLean, Co-founder of the OpenTelemetry project and Senior Director of Product Management at Splunk, stated, “It detects most of the applications people want to capture data from, such as databases, message queues and web servers, and it also shows custom applications. It will apply Open Telemetry language and instrumentation to extract data from them.”

Overlooked Applications

This feature is particularly valuable for what McLean referred to as “the pernicious issue of people forgetting that something exists. Perhaps it couldn’t be automatically configured, and you never got around to it. Our goal is to show people where those holes are so they can proactively fix them.”

Enhanced Kubernetes monitoring and troubleshooting capabilities provide greater visibility for identifying and resolving issues within Kubernetes clusters.

McLean said, “There’s a new user interface that allows you to visually explore the Kubernetes cluster, as well as some enhancements coming to our APM [application performance management] product that will display even more data in the context of application performance.”

Splunk is also launching OpenTelemetry Python 2.0 and Node.js 3.0 to strengthen support for cloud-native applications. By integrating with the latest OpenTelemetry versions, the update delivers more consistent and comprehensive visibility into microservices, enabling more effective troubleshooting.

This update aligns OpenTelemetry with the native semantics of those programming languages. McLean said, “We’re now locked in with the same release cycle.”

Cisco has partnered with Splunk in advocating for OpenTelemetry by integrating the standard directly into its ThousandEyes platform, which is used for monitoring and managing cloud-based environments. ThousandEyes links digital experience health with observability metrics.

AppDynamics, a comprehensive application performance management and IT operations analytics platform, also offers native support for OpenTelemetry. It includes an OpenTelemetry-compatible backend for trace data ingestion and report generation.

The new features are now accessible worldwide.