Splunk Joins Effort to Apply Visual Analytics to Hadoop

Splunk, which is already well-known for its analytics tool, has just announced Hunk 6.3--billed as a full-featured, integrated analytics platform used to interactively explore, analyze and visualize big data in Hadoop and Amazon S3. In addition, the company is out with updates to several products including Splunk MINT, and Splunk Light.

You can go to the Hunk page on the Splunk website to download the Hunk sandbox or to sign up for a free trial, and here are more details.

“At .conf2015, we are showcasing innovations across our entire portfolio of software and cloud solutions, and Hunk, Splunk Light and Splunk MINT are important pillars of our customers’ overall data strategy,” said Shay Mowlem, vice president product management and product marketing, Splunk. “Splunk MINT and Hunk help organizations gain value from two of the fastest-growing sources of data, mobile data and historical data in Hadoop. Small IT teams can also now utilize Splunk Light as a cloud service.”

With the new version of Hunk, users can analyze data transferred from Splunk Enterprise to Hadoop using third-party Hadoop tools such as Hive and Pig without needing to transform or replicate data.  

Hadoop is well-known for having a learning curve, but Hunk applies the analytics and visualization capabilities in Splunk Enterprise to data stored in Hadoop, creating a visual front-end for the complex big data tool.

Splunk is actually one of several companies focusing on making Hadoop more approachable through visual analytics. Arcadia Data, which specializes in visual analytics and business intelligence (BI) for big data is offering Arcadia Enterprise, a visual analytics and BI solution that runs natively in Hadoop.

Arcadia Enterprise purportedly collapses the legacy enterprise data management stack for visualization and business intelligence on big data. The platform has a self-learning architecture native to Hadoop, and can autoscale thousands of simultaneous queries. 

Arcadia Enterprise has a visual interface for exploration and semantic modeling on data sets. It also offers drag-and-drop access to granular path analysis, flow and funnel algorithms, behavior-based segmentation and dimension/measure correlations through on-cluster execution. We covered the offering in depth here.

Gartner, Inc.'s 2015 Hadoop Adoption Study found that there are many difficulties in implementing Hadoop, including hardship in finding skilled Hadoop professionals. Splunk, Arcadia and others are seeking out possible solutions to the problem, relying primarily on visual analytics atop the Hadoop platform.