What's New
We are excited to announce the latest enhancements to Splunk Observability, designed to help ITOps and engineering teams troubleshoot application issues faster and gain deeper insight into critical user journeys. These new features became generally available to customers on Sept 30, 2025.
The September Observability launches feature improved support for hybrid application monitoring, more context for synthetics test alerts for more actionable troubleshooting, user experience improvements toenable easier navigation, and custom Observability roles in Splunk Cloud which provide customers with greater security and improved data management.
Feature Highlights
Monitor hybrid apps and business transactions in Observability Cloud APM
Many teams run both traditional n-tier applications and cloud-native services, and they need application performance monitoring (APM) that bridges both worlds. We’re releasing new capabilities in Splunk Observability Cloud to strengthen APM for cloud-native applications and extend support for hybrid environments — building on AppDynamics’ proven expertise in monitoring traditional three-tier applications.
Highlights include:
- Business Transactions provide flexible, precise monitoring of business workflows
- Call Graphs deliver code-level insights and enable faster root cause analysis.
- Service map grouping visually groups related services by indexed span tags and tracks their health, aligning with how teams work
- Service instance visibility improves correlation between application and infrastructure data.
Together, these capabilities deliver a single APM solution for organizations building and operating hybrid or microservices-centric applications. Read our blog post for more details.
Enriched synthetics alerts for more actionable notifications
When a synthetic test fails, responders often waste time hunting for context. Now you can customize detector alert notifications with rich Synthetics run metrics, including step-level failure details, direct URLs to the failed run and screenshots, and more. This lets you determine the cause of a run failure directly from the alert payload sent to Splunk Cloud or third-party tools.
Check out the new Synthetics run metrics here. The default alert notification now includes these metrics in a cleaner, easier-to-read format, helping teams triage incidents faster and reduce downtime.
Custom Observability Roles in Splunk Cloud Milestone 2: All Capabilities
There is no uniformity to how companies and teams are organized. Customers need flexibility and better control over who can access what. Splunk Cloud Administrators can now create custom Observability Cloud roles in Splunk Cloud that match their organizations unique personas. All observability capabilities are now available in Splunk Cloud to centrally manage users — simplifying administration and consistency across Splunk Cloud and Observability Cloud.
Customer roles in Splunk Cloud benefits:
- Improved access management: Administrators can create roles that precisely match their organization's unique user personas. This ensures that users are granted only the "least privileged" permissions necessary for their tasks, thereby improving overall security posture.
- Enhanced security with least privilege permissions: As part of the Unified Identity integration, it allows for centralized management of users and roles, simplifying administration and consistency across Splunk Cloud and O11y capabilities.
- Tailored access control: It enables granular control over who can access and manage specific O11y features and pages, aligning access more closely with job functions and responsibilities.
Metrics Finder React Migration
We’ve made improvements to the user experiences in the Metrics Finder tool which enables customers to find, view, and edit metrics and metadata in their Splunk Observability instance. The new user experience changes provide:
- Friendlier and snappier autocomplete experience: Users can start typing and immediately see results.
- Home page category organization changes: Users will see containers containing categories instead of lists
- Filter UI changes: Users can see all = / != options instead of needing to mouseover/hover over each name:value filter suggestion.
- Results display improvements:
- Clicking on a metric name opens additional details. There is now a separate “View in chart” link to support that behavior.
- Users can click to expand all details and related properties.
- Users can see more metric names before needing to scroll.
Observability Navigation Drawer
The Observability Navigator in Splunk Observability Cloud offers a seamless and intuitive user experience by streamlining navigation and improving discoverability. This new feature provides consistency in the look and feel of different applications across our portfolio. The change simplifies user’s access to navigate to the experiences they need in Splunk Observability Cloud.
Its key benefits include:
- Intuitive Navigation: Users can quickly find what they need without extensive clicking, as the navigation structure aligns with typical workflows.
- Workflow Alignment: The layout prioritizes frequently accessed items at the top, core full-stack observability products/features in the middle, and data management/settings at the bottom.
- Enhanced Discoverability: Navigation categories make it easier to explore and highlight key features, including new products, helping users understand the overall structure of observability components.
- Flexibility and Scalability: The design supports future growth, allowing for the integration of new areas like Security and Optimization without overwhelming the user.
What’s in Alpha / Beta Now
Splunk Database Monitoring Get deep visibility into query performance and execution plans—correlated with app performance via Splunk APM—all in one tool for faster, smarter troubleshooting. We’re seeking existing Splunk Observability Cloud customers who are using Microsoft SQL Server databases looking to empower application teams to troubleshoot and resolve database and query performance issues; minimizing the extensive back-and-forth between application and database administrators. Interested in joining this preview? Sign up here. |
Splunk Observability Cloud Multi-Org Management - Child Org Automation Preview Program Splunk Observability Cloud introduces multi-org management self-service experience with APIs for child org creation enabling role-based data segregation. Interested in joining this preview? Sign up here. |
Splunk Observability Cloud Left Navigation Improvements Get a sneak peek into Splunk Observability Cloud’s improved user interface for an easier and more intuitive experience. This preview is best for existing Splunk Observability Cloud customers. Interested in joining this preview? Sign up here. |
Episode Summarization in Splunk IT Service Intelligence (ITSI) Currently in alpha (private preview), new AI-Directed summarization of episodes in ITSI provide high level overviews in plain language of the notable events, service impact, & other metadata for troubleshooting & post incident analysis. Sign up here. |
Business Insights in Observability Cloud Alpha Program Business Journeys, the key feature of Business Insights in Splunk Observability Cloud, empowers business owners and product managers to visualize, analyze, and optimize end-to-end business processes. Leveraging APM and RUM data, it simplifies troubleshooting by correlating technical performance with business impact. Features include up to 50 milestones, auto-discovery, and multi-application connection via transition keys, enabling cloud-based business process optimization. Sign up here. |
Splunk Cloud Observability - Admin Permissions for OrgTokens Private Preview to assign - Admin Permissions for OrgTokens. Sign up here. |
Splunk App Dynamics APM K8s Deep Linking Customers will experience an INTEGRATED approach that allows the existing AppDynamics customers to leverage the capabilities of Observability Cloud for modern applications and all infrastructure, by creating bi-directional integrations between the 2 products. Sign up here. |
Splunk RUM <> Thousand Eyes Integration The RUM-TE integration helps Developer and SRE teams reduce Mean Time to Identify (MTTI) by quickly distinguishing between application and network-layer performance issues. Sign up here. |
Observability for AI Observability for AI supports LLM Monitoring and Infrastructure Monitoring for AI components. Sign up here. |
Digital Experience Analytics in Observability Cloud Alpha Program The preview program for O11y Digital Experience Analytics (DEA) offers selected customers an exclusive opportunity to explore and test this brand-new offering alongside RUM before its general release. Sign up here. |
Secure Application on Splunk Observability Cloud |
