Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

IDG’s recent “State of the CIO” survey across IT leaders has revealed the impact of COVID-19 on IT organizations and the sudden and unforeseen shifts of their initial 2020 plans.

Everyone at Splunk is very proud of the amazing things that our customers and partners do with their data. It is always extra special when one of those organisations is really doing good and looking after us all in our daily lives. I’m delighted to share one of those stories from the Derbyshire Fire & Rescue Service (DFRS) who is using Splunk as its data-driven SIEM.

One of the great things about developing for Splunk Security Essentials is that most of the features and capabilities are requested from customers and the security community. In this latest release (3.1), we added a feature that has been requested frequently: the ability to filter the ATT&CK Matrix for Cloud and SaaS Techniques. The MITRE ATT&CK Framework consists of multiple matrices such as Enterprise, Mobile, and ICS.

We're excited to announce that the Splunk Machine Learning Toolkit (MLTK) version 5.2 is available for download today on Splunkbase! Earlier this month, I discussed how the release of version 5.2 will make machine learning more accessible to more users. Splunk’s MLTK lets our customers apply machine learning to the data they're already capturing in Splunk, develop models, and operationalize these algorithms to glean new insights and make more informed decisions.

The Splunk App for Infrastructure (SAI) has changed the game when it comes to IT Operations monitoring and alerting of metrics and logs. The App provides a uniform and dynamic overview dashboard, and an analysis workspace for a simple method to work with metrics.

Over the past few weeks, Splunk has created a number of different tools to help bring data to the COVID-19 crisis. These tools, such as a public dashboard, an app on Github, and a Mobile Dashboard can be used to identify locations of outbreaks, find correlations and more.

The Kubernetes framework has become the leading orchestration platform. Originally developed by Google, Kubernetes is a "platform for automating deployment, scaling, and operations of application containers across clusters of hosts" * . The kubernetes platform is used in all Cloud platform provider vendors as a tool that allows orchestration, automation and provision of applications and specific needs computing clusters and services.

Earlier this year Python 2 entered End of Life — and Splunk has already released versions of Splunk Cloud and Splunk Enterprise that provide a Python 3 runtime. As the developer of an app that is published to Splunkbase, if your app contains Python code, you need to update it to work with Python 3 and Splunk Enterprise 8.0 by July 1, 2020 as the Splunk Enterprise and Splunk Cloud releases after that date will no longer support the Python 2 runtime.

Even with tough economic times, e-commerce is up 25% since the beginning of March. But, fraud has increased as well; according to Malwarebytes online credit card skimming has increased by 26% in March alone. In our April “Staff Picks for Splunk Security Reading” blog post, I referenced a story about an e-commerce site getting hacked with a “virtual card skimmer” (thanks Matthew Joseff for sharing this with me).

If you're reading this, you're probably wondering how to get data from various Microsoft Azure services into Splunk. With the growing list of Azure services and various data access methods, it can be a little cloudy (pun intended) on what data is available and how to get all that data into Splunk. In this blog post, I'm going go over how Microsoft makes Azure data available, how to access the data, and out-of-the-box Splunk Add-Ons that can consume this data. So let's dive right in.