Tableau-Splunk Partnership: Bringing the Power of Visual Analytics to Machine Data

We’re very pleased to announce that Tableau and Splunk are partnering together to expand the use of machine data throughout the organization. The first yield of this partnership is a new connector to Splunk Enterprise, which is included in the Tableau 8.1.4 maintenance release.

This Integration is exciting for several reasons. First, Splunk is one of those technologies that has truly disrupted the operational intelligence space and has provided IT professionals with incredible productivity gains and insights into their IT environments. Second, there is a wealth of potential value lying in the machine data that Splunk collects. This machine data could include server and application logs, as well data from APIs and message queues, change events, and sensor data from remote equipment. The integration now makes this new class of data available to business users in true Tableau drag-and-drop fashion. Finally, and related to the last point, this machine data can now be easily blended with other structured data in the organization, such as spreadsheets and databases, to answer new types of questions that were previously hard or impossible to answer in the past.

The connector utilizes the new ODBC driver built by Splunk, and we have collaborated closely with the Splunk product team on the integration to ensure a smooth user experience. The connector provides access to Splunk Saved Searches, which can be brought into Tableau for further exploration using Tableau’s visual and interactive drag-and-drop paradigm. The connector benefits from all the same advantages as our other data connectors including a fast connect-and-go experience, our flexible connection architecture using live queries or the Tableau Data engine, the ability to blend Splunk data with other data sources, and more.

Tableau’s Dustin Smith has created a short video demonstrating how Tableau users can connect to Splunk Enterprise, and interact with this machine data in Tableau.

For more information on the new Tableau-Splunk integration be sure to checkout our new solutions page.

As always, we’d love to hear your feedback about the integration and how you are using it to derive deeper insights from all your data.