Get started with Splunk Observability Cloud ๐
This topic covers five high-level steps you can follow to get started with Splunk Observability Cloud and its products, which include Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring, Splunk Application Performance Monitoring (APM), Splunk Real User Monitoring (RUM), and Splunk Log Observer.
For an introduction to Splunk Observability Cloud products, see Splunk Observability Cloud overview.
For information about how these products can be used together to address real-life scenarios, see Scenario: Kai troubleshoots an issue from the browser to the back end using Splunk Observability Cloud.
Follow these steps to set up and make the most of Splunk Observability Cloud:
Configuration stages |
Task overview |
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Single sign-on, Access tokens, Admins and users, Teams, Notification service integrations (Jira, PagerDuty, and more) |
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2. Get data into Splunk Observability Cloud from your: |
Cloud services, Servers, Server applications, Clusters, Applications, Serverless functions, User interfaces |
Infrastructure Monitoring, Real User Monitoring, Log Observer, Application Performance Monitoring, Related Content |
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Detectors and alerts, Custom dashboards, Span tags, Business workflows, Logs pipeline, Custom data |
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5. Create global data links from dashboards and alerts to: |
Splunk Observability Cloud dashboards, Splunk Cloud Platform, Splunk Enterprise, Custom URLs, Kibana logs |
1. Create a plan and set up your organization ๐
Before you start, create a plan for how you want to set up your Splunk Observability Cloud organization. For information about how to plan for and set up your Splunk Observability Cloud organization, see Set up your Splunk Observability Cloud organization.
2. Get data into Splunk Observability Cloud ๐
Gather all the data from your environment in Splunk Observability Cloud to achieve full-stack observability. For information about how to get data in, see Get data into Splunk Observability Cloud.
As a part of getting data in, make sure to consider bringing in data in a way that allows Related Content in Splunk Observability Cloud, a feature that automatically correlates data between different views within Splunk Observability Cloud. When turned on, the Related Content bar displays automatically when you select a relevant element and lets you take a data-driven investigative approach.
To learn more about Splunk Observability Cloudโs data model, refer to Data types in Splunk Observability Cloud.
3. Explore and analyze your data ๐
Once you have data coming into Splunk Observability Cloud, itโs time to do some exploring. For example, you can:
Use Infrastructure Monitoring to analyze the performance of cloud services, hosts, and containers, or view the health of your infrastructure at a glance, and view outlier conditions in your hybrid infrastructure.
Use APM to analyze the performance of applications down to the microservice level, investigate latencies in your application requests, and monitor inbound and outbound dependencies for each service.
Use RUM to analyze the performance of web and mobile applications and keep track of how users are interacting with your front-end services, including page load times and responsiveness.
Use Log Observer or Log Observer Connect to pinpoint interesting log events and troubleshoot issues with your infrastructure and cloud services.
As described in step 2. Get data into Splunk Observability Cloud, if you turned on Related Content in Splunk Observability Cloud when setting up your data integrations, you can select options in the Related Content bar to seamlessly navigate between APM, Log Observer, and Infrastructure Monitoring with your selected filters and context automatically applied to each view.
Use the mobile app to check system critical metrics in Splunk Observability Cloud on the go, access real-time alerts with visualizations, and view mobile-friendly dashboards.
4. Set up alerts and customize your experience ๐
Now that youโve explored and familiarized yourself with the data you have coming into Splunk Observability Cloud, set up detectors to issue alerts about your data and customize your Splunk Observability Cloud experience.
Set up detectors to send alerts when your incoming data contains conditions you want to know about.
In addition to exploring your data using Infrastructure Monitoring navigators and built-in dashboards, you can also create new dashboards and customize existing ones.
In addition to the built-in data you already have coming into Splunk Observability Cloud, you can also bring in custom data. For more information, see Configure and instrument applications to send custom data and Use the Splunk Observability Cloud API to send custom data.
Customize your APM experience by setting up business workflows and creating span tags that add metadata to traces sent to APM. For more information, see Correlate traces to track Business Workflows and Add context to spans with span tags in Splunk APM.
Customize your logs pipeline to add value to your raw logs.
5. Create global data links ๐
Now that youโve customized your Splunk Observability Cloud experience, create global data links to further enrich the user experience.
Global data links provide convenient access to related resources, such as Splunk Observability Cloud dashboards, Splunk Cloud Platform and Splunk Enterprise, custom URLs, and Kibana logs in the context of the following locations in Splunk Observability Cloud:
Dashboards
Alerts
APM
Infrastructure Monitoring navigators
For more information, see Link metadata to related resources using global data links.