As software delivery cycles continue to accelerate, observability shouldn’t be a luxury — it should be a foundational element of your architecture. Today, we are thrilled to announce the launch of our new Splunk Observability Cloud Free Edition, designed to remove the barriers between developers and the insights they need to build, scale, and secure their applications. Our philosophy is simple: Observability for everyone from day one. What you get with Observability Cloud Free Edition 15 free hosts, forever. All the features. gates or up charges for additional features. Metrics and traces are available for all! Get all the features We believe that the best way to see the value of an observability platform is to use it. When there's a feature gap between the tool you need and the tool you actually have access to, that throws a wrench in your project or proof of concept (POC). Because the free edition is limited only by hosts, not by features, you get the full all-in-one experience. By providing free access with all features enabled, you can experience the full power of our platform without the friction of procurement cycles, feature gates, or 14-day trials. No credit card. No talking to sales. Just sign up and you’re off and running. Built for everyone Whether you are a solo developer building the next big or a platform engineer, this free edition is for you. The AI/Agent Developer: With the rise of AI aagents behave — and fail — in unpredictable and silent ways. Our free edition allows you to instrument, evaluate and observe your agent stack—including LLM call tracing, tool invocation spans, and token cost metrics—immediately. No credit card or procurement conversations required. The Startup Team: Don’t wait until something breaks to think about observability. Start with the same enterprise-grade tooling you will use at Series B. From dashboards to log pipelines, build your incident runbooks on a platform that grows with you. The Platform & DevOps Engineer: Forget the 14-day trial clock. Take the time to build real integrations, create meaningful dashboards, and run the product through a real incident. Let the business case write itself. The Security-Conscious Lead: Observability data is security data. By deploying our agents across your infrastructure, you gain the telemetry needed for both performance monitoring and threat detection, creating shared context across your SecOps, ITOps and engineering teams. The Open-Source Maintainer: If you’re involved with OpenTelemetry, or another open source observability project, we want to be part of your reference architecture. By making our platform accessible, we hope to empower the developer community to build, share, and advocate for better observability standards. Get started today Observability has never been more accessible. Whether you are working on a home project, a startup POC, or a complex AI agent workflow, get your free edition now and experience the power of Observability Cloud. Not ready for a test drive? Kick the tires! Splunk Observability Cloud Playground offers you the ability to click through the entire platform with pre-populated data, so you can get a feel for the UI and features. If you like what you see, sign up for a free edition right in the app. Play around with Observability Cloud now.   Want updates like this sent straight to you? Learn how to subscribe to this blog (and follow Labels you care about) in our quick guide.  ... View more

Splunk Observability Cloud continues to evolve, empowering engineering and operations teams with advanced capabilities for security, monitoring, and troubleshooting. In this release, we’re excited to introduce several new features that streamline workflows, enhance security, and offer deeper insights across your infrastructure and applications. Below, we break down each highlight with its core benefits. What's New   Secure Application on Splunk Observability Cloud The Secure Application feature helps engineering teams transition from reactive vulnerability management to proactive defense, all without the burden of toggling between multiple tools or deploying additional agents. By seamlessly unifying security and observability within Splunk Observability Cloud, this feature detects runtime vulnerabilities in real time using existing agents and correlates security risks with application context—such as services, environments, and libraries. Teams gain actionable insights to accelerate secure code delivery, continuously scan code, and prevent exploits—moving from constant firefighting to continuous protection. Read more about Secure Application for Splunk Observability Cloud in this blog.   Connect User and Network Insights: Real User Monitoring Integration with ThousandEyes With the integration of Splunk’s Real User Monitoring (RUM) and ThousandEyes, organizations get unified visibility into global user experience and network performance. This solution combines real-user data from Splunk with network insights from ThousandEyes, enabling engineering teams to quickly determine if issues originate from the application or the network. The result is faster troubleshooting, reduced mean time to resolution, and an improved user experience. This integration is GA and available at no extra cost for joint customers. For more information check out our docs here.   RUM URL Grouping List View This new view aggregates all URL Groups—including those for pages, route changes, and network requests—across both BRUM and MRUM types. Users can easily drill down from any problematic URL to the tag spotlight for deeper insights on metric trends or specific sessions. No manual actions are required, as customers are automatically enabled, providing instant visibility into all generated URL Groups and facilitating more effective troubleshooting. For more information check out our docs here.   RUM Session Details UX Enhancements Based on customer feedback, the Session Troubleshooting Experience has been overhauled for greater usability. The new design of the Session Details page seamlessly integrates Session Replay with troubleshooting data, offering bi-directional navigation between replays and metrics. Users can link each page in a session replay to the corresponding troubleshooting data, quickly investigate issues, and customize or pin key attributes for rapid access. The streamlined interface reduces clutter and enhances readability, providing a faster, more intuitive troubleshooting process with prioritized insights. For more information check our or docs here.   Token-Based License Allocation & Visibility Admins can now centrally assign and manage RUM session licenses across multiple teams, apps, or business units with token pools. Each team is allocated a specific token limit, ensuring monthly usage stays within bounds and overages require admin approval. Real-time visibility into token consumption allows for agile allocation adjustments and automatic license compliance, all within the Token Management section of Splunk RUM. This promotes transparency, accountability, and flexible usage planning. For more information check out our docs here.      Kubernetes Monitoring 2.0 Kubernetes Monitoring 2.0 delivers a more intuitive and comprehensive monitoring experience, tailored for the challenges of dynamic Kubernetes environments. Enhancements include customizable tables, enriched filters, in-context navigation, and real-time problem isolation, empowering teams to correlate metrics, logs, events, and configurations for faster root cause analysis. New support for YAML manifest integration and Horizontal Pod Autoscalers further optimizes monitoring and scaling, helping teams prevent configuration drift and operate more confidently. For more information check out our docs here.   Archiving and Restoring Histogram Metrics Customers can now archive and restore histogram metrics in addition to standard metrics, optimizing observability costs. Archived metrics count as one-tenth of a real-time metric toward license limits. This is accessible via Metric Pipeline Management, allowing users to flexibly manage storage and retrieval of metrics as needed for improved cost efficiency and data management. For more information check out our docs here.   API Admin Token Admins can now create access tokens with admin roles directly via the API, enabling automated management of administrator permissions and license extraction. This streamlines automation and integration workflows for administrative tasks, reducing dependency on manual UI operations. For more information check out our docs here.   Encrypt SAML SSO Assertions for Observability Cloud This feature encrypts SAML SSO assertions for enhanced security of user authentication data during transmission between identity providers (like OKTA) and Splunk. Administrators can enable this during OKTA integration setup, ensuring all users benefit from stronger data protection and compliance with security best practices—critical for federal and regulated environments. For more information check out our docs here.   Persistent & Context-Aware Logs Experience in Service-Centric View A new persistent, context-aware logs experience in Service-Centric Views ensures that log connections are always aligned with selected environments, eliminating unreliable legacy configurations. This unified Entity–Index Mapping system enhances troubleshooting predictability and reliability, making it easier for teams to find relevant logs and speed up incident resolution. For more information check out our docs here.   Optimizing Log Searches in OOTB Dashboards The Logs Component in out-of-the-box dashboards now uses existing Entity-to-Index Mappings for log searches, ensuring faster, more efficient, and contextually relevant insights. This update reduces unnecessary resource consumption, lowers Splunk Virtual Core (SVC) costs, and improves the user experience without requiring additional setup. For more information check out our docs here.   Auto Entity–Index Mapping Generation at User Context Entity–Index mappings are now automatically generated in the background when users access key log experiences, eliminating the need for manual admin setup. This ensures up-to-date, accurate log correlation across environments, supporting seamless and automated troubleshooting while retaining manual override controls. For more information check out our docs here. Database Monitoring PostgreSQL Native PostgreSQL monitoring allows teams to track and analyze key database metrics, visualize performance data, and proactively optimize queries. Features include slow query identification, execution plan analysis, correlation with application traces, and AI-driven query recommendations. Teams can optimize, secure, and scale PostgreSQL environments directly within the platform—without switching tools. For more information check out our docs here.      Database Monitoring UI Improvements The refreshed database monitoring UI offers clearer visualization of health and performance metrics, with actionable insights surfaced contextually. This streamlines troubleshooting, allowing users to rapidly detect and resolve anomalies and maintain optimal database performance with less effort. For more information check out our docs here.    Comprehensive Service Monitoring: Multi-dimensional MMSs Splunk APM now supports Monitoring Metric Sets (MMS) with up to five custom dimensions, allowing for granular filtering and grouping. Users can analyze by service version, HTTP status, feature flag, region, or environment, supporting more complex use cases within the UI. This enhancement delivers deeper insights and accelerates issue detection and resolution across diverse services and environments.For more information check out our docs here.   What’s in Preview Mobile Real User Monitoring Hybrid Framework Support  Developers can now leverage Splunk Observability for mobile apps built with React Native and Flutter, with the same out-of-the-box metrics provided for native iOS and Android apps, and see all of their mobile observability data in a unified view. Sign up on this page.  Splunk Observability Network Monitoring with Isovalent  Network Explorer in Splunk Observability can now help customers wanting deeper visibility into networks using eBPF. Sign up on this page.  Observability AI Admin Assistant - Custom Role Creation and Management via MCP Sign Up  Splunk Observability Cloud admins can now create Custom Roles via an MCP to control granular read and write capabilities for end users to ensure appropriate access across the product, like having a user be able to create a dashboard but not an alert. Please sign up to be considered for the Alpha. Sign up on this page.  Splunk Observability Cloud self-service experience to access audit logs  Splunk Cloud observability introduces self-service APIs to access audit logs enabling them for security, compliance use-cases by tracking user actions and system changes. Sign up on this page.  ITSI Episode Summarization  Episode summarization provides enterprise support teams accurate, concise, and contextually rich episode summarization and basic root cause analysis by leveraging LLMs, cutting down the number of clicks from 8-10 down to 1 to get most relevant context of an episode including actionable insights. Sign up on this page.  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 on this page.  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 on this page.    Thanks for reading to the end! Splunk Observability Cloud’s latest features deliver on the promise of unified security, smarter monitoring, and more efficient troubleshooting. Whether you’re optimizing user journeys, scaling cloud-native environments, or securing your applications, these enhancements empower your teams with the context and agility needed to stay ahead.   ... View more

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 Secure Application on Splunk Observability Cloud is a new capability to lighten workload for application teams by providing direct visibility into runtime exploitable vulnerabilities and automatically mapping them to their corresponding application services. This allows teams to proactively address critical risks and safely de-prioritize non-exploitable ones. Sign up here.    ... View more

Automated Archival is a new capability within Metrics Management; which is a robust usage & cost optimization solution to combat concerns of growing observability costs. This new feature automatically routes and stores unused metric data in a low-cost archival tier using preset rules. After configuring the automation process, users can now delegate the archiving process to Splunk and have their unused metrics automatically archived, allowing them to more effectively reduce their costs and optimize their metrics volume at scale. This low-cost archival tier is approximately ten percent of the cost of the real-time tier and provides Splunk Observability Cloud customers with a solid low-cost option for long term storage of less valuable metrics. This provides easier control over metrics volume and streamline the data management experience. Learn more on how to Archive your metrics to reduce billing cost  Stay In the Know Read about all of the latest Splunk Observability Clouds Releases   ... View more

The SignalFx Smart Agent has reached End Of Support today, June 30th, 2023. While the agent can capture and export telemetry to Splunk Observability Cloud, Splunk no longer provides any support, feature updates, security, or bug fixes. Such requests are not bound by any SLAs. If you are still using the SignalFx Smart Agent, we recommend that you migrate to the Splunk Distribution of OpenTelemetry Collector. You can learn more about what this means for you and information about the OpenTelemetry Collector in this blog. This is a follow up to the email communications since December last year and updates shared in the Observability newsletters. ... View more

Over the past two years, we have been working hard to create the best experience for Splunk Observability Cloud customers. We feel that we have reached an inflection point where the Splunk Observability user experience far surpasses that of the classic SignalFx version (which is still accessible). That is why starting Sep 30, 2022, the “Switch to Classic” functionality will be removed. Access to the original user interface will no longer be available.                       What that means for you, the customer: There are no major changes to the experience for users other than not being able to access the “Classic” user interface There is no action required of admins or users of the product Any URLs containing “../classic/#/home…” will be redirected to the new URL path; which means nothing will break if you have classic URLs bookmarked. You will simply be led to the new user interface Thank you for being a customer of Splunk Observability Cloud and providing the feedback to continue making the product industry-leading. Have questions or need more clarification? Please reach out via the Support Portal. — Courtney Gannon, Product Marketing Manager, OpenSource & Observability ... View more

Beginning March 16, 2022, the world-class Splunk Observability Support Portal is moving from SignalFx over to Splunk Salesforce.  What does this mean if I’m a NEW customer? Trial or POC users: Splunk Answers is the easiest route to get help.  If trial customers need help with password resets, they can call Customer Service.  Customers:  Opening a new case: Customers may use the Splunk Support Portal or call Customer Service.   Accessing the Splunk Support Portal: From this link, or by clicking on Support and Community within the Observability Suite. * Chat: No change (accessed from within the product) What does this mean for EXISTING customers? All open cases will be migrated to the Splunk Support Portal.  New cases cannot be created by emailing [email protected] or [email protected]. They will receive an automated response suggesting other routes to get support (Splunk Support Portal or Customer Service). Access the Splunk Support Portal: From this link, or by clicking on Support and Community within the Observability Suite. * Chat: No change (accessed from within the product) *Don’t forget that your Observability login is NOT the same as your  Splunk Support Portal login. You will need to create a Splunk account (if you don’t already have one) to access your cases. The  “Working with Support” deck explains how to register and submit a support case. — Courtney Gannon, Product Marketing Manager, Open Source ... View more