Going the ExtraHop

ITOA (IT Operations Analytics) is going mainstream big style in 2014. This is an area I am particularly interested in from an instrumentation, aggregation, analytics and visualisation perspective. This is an area IT folks can really add some business differentiation, but there are a number of hurdles to overcome: breaking down the silos, the usual road to DevOps enlightenment.

I had an interesting update from ExtraHop today. They have slick on-the-wire instrumentation product that does packet header analysis and correlation in real-time. They're also able to offload to Splunk to take advantage of Splunk's indexing capabilities; one nice result of this means you can use less Splunk license given you're targeting the data that's indexed using triggers (don't tell Splunk's sales people;-).