Home > Workload Solutions > Data Analytics > White Papers > White Paper—Cloud Native Splunk Enterprise with SmartStore—Predictive Maintenance for IT Operations > What is Splunk?
Splunk is an extensible data platform that delivers unified security and full-stack observability on infrastructure from the edge to the data center to the cloud. This platform enables you to investigate, monitor, analyze, and act upon your data.
Splunk Enterprise is an on-premises software product for enabling enterprises to collect, search, organize, analyze, and visualize data that is gathered from various system components. Splunk Enterprise ingests log and streaming data from a wide variety of sources, including websites, applications, sensors, and devices.
As shown in the figure below, the Splunk platform collects data from many sources. These sources include metrics, logs, and traces from clickstreams, sensors, streaming network traffic, web servers, hypervisors, containers, social media, cloud services, and custom applications. It enables you to search, monitor, and analyze that data to discover powerful insights across multiple use cases like security, IT operations, application delivery, industrial data, and IoT.
Figure 1. Splunk Platform (source: Splunk)
Splunk supports real-time streaming data and, with the power of machine learning built in, you can make faster, more informed decisions across the organization. The Splunk platform indexes all the data and provides search, visualization, and collaboration capabilities.
As a highly extensible platform, Splunk also supplies their own apps for use cases such as security and observability. Splunk supports community-built and custom-built apps using the Splunkbase community.
With Splunk Enterprise, everyone from data and security analysts to business users can gain insights to drive operational performance and business results. Whether you want to troubleshoot IT, monitor your security posture or application development, or predict and prevent outages and breaches before they occur, Splunk Enterprise can help get you there.