Less than a year after acquiring SignalFX and Omnition, Splunk has rolled out its latest application performance monitoring (APM) platform that builds on the strengths of both companies.

SignalFx Microservices APM pairs what it calls "no-sample" monitoring and analysis features of its progenitor with the full-fidelity tracing capabilities from Omnition. The result, Karthik Rau, GM of Splunk’s Application Management team and founder of SignalFx, says is a platform that’s perfectly tailored to the challenges of application monitoring in the cloud-native era and is designed to help DevOps teams identify problems and opportunities faster.

The launch is Splunk's first since it acquired SignalFx for $1.05 billion. It's also the first time Omnition's technology has seen public release. Founded in 2018, Omnition was acquired before it had even launched its first product.

The shift to containers, Kubernetes, and microservices is filled with as many advantages as it is fraught with challenges. One of them being that traditional methods of monitoring simply don’t work anymore, Rau said.

Today, applications are no longer monolithic, he explained. They’re made up of a bunch of individual applications and this requires a new way of thinking about performance monitoring and troubleshooting.

“Anytime you have a problem in one [microservice] it could have upstream or downstream consequences and the whole application could end up being slow or having problems,” Rau said.

Making this even more complicated is that the infrastructure on which the application runs is dynamic. Instead of a single server that might be in use for years, Rau said, applications are now running in containers that might be spun up and down in a matter of minutes.

And this transition to cloud-native environments means there is a much larger volume of data to make sense of.

It’s not enough to sample application data every 100 or so transactions anymore, said Rau. “Because today’s applications are changing so quickly and there are all these corner cases you can’t anticipate, we believe it’s really important to collect everything."

Using technology acquired from Omnition, SignalFx can trace every application transition in real time.

But Rau says collecting the data only addresses half of the problem. Data is only useful if the user can make sense of it.

That’s where artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) come in to play. Once the data is collected and stored, SignalFx uses a combination of AI and ML to connect the dots and drive relevant information to the surface allowing DevOps teams to spend less time searching for the source of the problem and more time resolving it.

Launching alongside SignalFx Microservices APM is a capability within Splunk’s infrastructure monitoring service, also acquired with the purchase of SignalFx, called Kubernetes Navigator. The feature is designed to make it easier to understand and manage the performance of Kubernetes environments using AI-enhanced analytics to automatically surface relevant information and expedite training and troubleshooting.

Splunk claims DevOps teams can now use the SignalFX Infrastructure Monitoring to detect and resolve cloud performance issues faster and more reliably.