IT infrastructures are increasingly complex and include a broad range of technologies and platforms hosted in physical, virtual and cloud environments. Cisco UCS has become a world leading server platform in large part because the unique UCS architecture enables organization to harness the power of virtualization and dramatically simplify infrastructure management.

Splunk is a great complement to Cisco UCS because Splunk also helps organizations deal with the complexity of vast multi-vendor, multi-product, and multi-site environments.  Splunk is a platform for real-time big data analytics which enables end-to-end, cross-tier visibility across applications, physical, virtual, and cloud infrastructure.

Do you need insights into your UCS server performance? Would it be valuable to troubleshoot application issues across server, storage, networking, and other domains? Are you already using Splunk to "... make machine data accessible, usable and valuable..."? Then you need to be using the just updated Splunk Add-on for Cisco UCS.

Splunk's first (and only) out-of-the-box integration for server environments, Splunk integration with Cisco UCS provides real-time operational visibility not just across Cisco UCS domains but across multiple applications and infrastructure tiers.  This enables organizations to identify & resolve problems faster, proactively monitor systems & infrastructure, track key performance indicators & understand trends & patterns of activity & behavior.

The Splunk add-on for Cisco UCS allows a Splunk Enterprise administrator to collect UCS performance, inventory, and fault data from Cisco UCS Manager using the UCS XML API. All the data is and can be integrated with other Splunk applications for products such as Cisco ASA Firewalls or Cisco Nexus Switches or Microsoft Exchange. Did you know that Splunk has over 20 integrations for Cisco products?

If you are thinking about adding Splunk insights into your environment, this is even more of a reason to do it on Cisco UCS servers. Last November, Ragu Nambiar blogged about a joint reference architecture with Splunk that improves performance up to 25x over the Splunk reference hardware. Cisco also published a Solution Brief. Look for updates on the reference architecture from Ragu soon.

Will you be at Cisco Live next week? Be sure to go to Splunk's booth (#2319) to see the UCS app in action (or a number of the other integrations) or join the Big Data Analytics Demonstrations Booth Tours and find Splunk in Cisco's Connected Transportation IoT, Security Solutions and Enterprise Networks Pavilions.