Splunk plans to release later this year free plug-ins for both Splunk and Nagios in order to speed up diagnosis and response time to IT issues across an enterprise.
Splunk, which is a play on the term spelunk that means to explore caves, aggregates all system data and makes it searchable from a single interface. Splunk enables systems administrators to narrow down the root cause of a data center problem quickly by reverse engineering logic and following the trail of a transaction.
Nagios is a monitoring software for data centers and alerts administrators about changes in systems, including data center environments, such as an increase in temperature, for example, and data and IP voice traffic loads.
There are many modules to query and pull different systems to say, How are you feeling today, said Patrick McGovern, Splunk’s VP of community development and former engineer for open-source development community SourceForge.net, which is home to Nagios.
Nagios is very good at saying, There’s a problem but Splunk can help diagnose what’s happening by being able to do full-text queries directly on the log files for the different events that are happening, McGovern said.
In other words, Nagios acts as the warning system and Splunk as the problem finder.
Basically, the software we’re developing will be something in between the two platforms, McGovern said.
About 15,000 users download Nagios each month, while more than 24,000 have downloaded the Splunk Server since it launched last August.
Splunk plans to release Nagios and Splunk add-ons throughout this year, at no charge.
Former Yahoo and Infoseek engineers also helped developed the Splunk tool, which is available in a free versions as well as a licensed professional version for enterprise use.
San Francisco, California-based Splunk has raised a total of $15m in venture capital financing, following a second round of $10m last month, since it launched in November 2004.
Nagios lead developer Ethan Galstad joins Splunk’s advisory board.
