Splunk 10: A deep dive into a hardened, observability-driven platform

By Karsten Thygesen | 1,389 words | Read time: 7 minutes

Fellow data wranglers and security architects –

Let’s cut to the chase on Splunk’s latest iteration: Splunk Enterprise 10.0 and Splunk Cloud Platform 10.0. Forget the marketing fluff; let’s talk about the technical substance and why this release matters for your security and operations posture.

Splunk 10 isn’t just a point release; it’s a foundational hardening and strategic pivot towards ubiquitous observability. This directly impacts how we deploy, manage, and extract value from our data pipelines, especially within critical applications like Enterprise Security (ES) and IT Service Intelligence (ITSI).

Core Platform Enhancements: Beyond the Surface

Compliance-ready environment (FIPS 140-3): This is massive for highly regulated environments. Splunk 10 now formally meets FIPS 140-3 encryption requirements, a non-negotiable for FedRAMP and FISMA compliance. This isn’t just a checkbox; it’s an upgrade to the cryptographic modules (OpenSSL 3.0, Python 3.9, MongoDB) ensuring the platform’s cryptographic primitives are validated and secure. This significantly reduces the administrative burden of maintaining compliance. Even if this is all targeted American security standards, it is still a significant improvement in security and also relevant for our European customers. 
Edge Processor (GA for enterprise): The Edge Processor shifts SPL2-powered pipeline processing closer to the data source. This isn’t just about reducing ingest costs; it’s about intelligent, granular control over data before it hits the indexers. Think advanced filtering, data masking, routing based on policy, and on-the-fly transformations at the edge. This provides unprecedented flexibility for data governance and cost optimization.
Enhanced agent management: Managing distributed forwarder fleets has always been a nuanced art. Splunk 10 introduces enhanced agent management capabilities for Splunk Enterprise, providing centralized visibility into agent status and health. This facilitates large-scale deployments, remote upgrades, and proactive health monitoring, reducing operational overhead for managing hundreds to thousands of agents.
Ingest monitoring (Splunk Cloud platform): For our Cloud platform users, Ingest Monitoring offers real-time visibility into data pipelines. This allows for pinpointing latency issues, tracking ingestion volumes, and optimizing data flows, ensuring your data lands where it needs to be, when it needs to be there, without bottlenecks. We hope the same functionality will come to Splunk Enterprise in short time.
Dashboard Studio evolution: Dashboard Studio continues to mature. Key updates include the ability to publish dashboards without requiring a Splunk login (for Enterprise), enabling broader, controlled sharing of insights. Cloud Platform users get multi-tab exporting, enhanced tab interactions, expanded trellis layouts, dynamic map coloring, improved token management, and precise zoom controls. This is about delivering actionable intelligence more effectively.

OpenTelemetry: The Observability Keystone

This is where Splunk is making a definitive statement about the future of telemetry collection. Splunk 10, fundamentally, is built on an OpenTelemetry-first strategy for observability.

OTel collector integration in agent management: The significant leap here is the native support for OpenTelemetry collectors within Splunk’s unified agent management. This means you gain a single, streamlined view of every agent, whether it’s a Splunk Universal Forwarder or an OpenTelemetry Collector, used for data ingestion. This unified visibility enables proactive management, faster troubleshooting of data collection issues, and a more cohesive data operations experience across your entire environment, regardless of the telemetry source.
Foundational for Splunk Observability Cloud: Splunk has firmly established OpenTelemetry as the backbone of its Observability Cloud. This commitment translates into practical tooling designed to simplify OTel adoption and leverage its vendor-neutral telemetry.
Automated instrumentation and service inventory: Splunk is actively tackling the operational complexities of large-scale OTel adoption. The new Service Inventory feature provides automatic discovery and configuration. It auto-detects third-party applications (databases, message queues, web servers), offers step-by-step guidance for OTel setup, and critically highlights missing instrumentation. This addresses the “unknown unknowns” by identifying visibility gaps across your infrastructure, ensuring a more complete telemetry footprint without manual configuration headaches.
Enhanced Kubernetes observability: Splunk 10 deepens its Kubernetes monitoring and troubleshooting capabilities, directly leveraging OTel. This means richer visibility into Kubernetes clusters, with an improved UI to visually explore the cluster and APM enhancements that display more data in the context of application performance. The Splunk OpenTelemetry collector for Kubernetes (a Helm chart and validated architecture) is specifically designed to collect Kubernetes logs, metrics, and traces, enabling advanced pipeline features, data manipulation, routing, and masking/filtering for data sent to Splunk Cloud Platform, Splunk Enterprise, and Splunk Observability Cloud.
Language-specific OTel distributions: Splunk is rolling out updated distributions, specifically OpenTelemetry Python 2.0 and Node.js 3.0. These provide greater flexibility and improved performance for cloud-native applications, ensuring a more uniform and in-depth visibility into microservices. By aligning with the latest OTel language semantics, Splunk ensures consistent, high-fidelity data collection from your application code.
Collector architecture and components: The Splunk Distribution of the OpenTelemetry Collector adheres to the core OTel architecture, featuring:
Receivers: How data enters the Collector (e.g., host metrics, files, various protocols).
Processors: Operations on data before export (e.g., filtering, batching, attribute modification).
Exporters: Where data is sent (e.g., Splunk HEC, OTLP to Splunk Observability Cloud).
Extensions: Additional functionality (e.g., health checks, diagnostic data).
Connectors: Bridge between pipelines, consuming as an exporter and emitting as a receiver.
This modularity allows for highly customizable and efficient telemetry pipelines.

Impact on Splunk apps: Enterprise Security (ES) and IT Service Intelligence (ITSI)

Splunk 10’s core platform improvements provide a stronger, more efficient foundation that directly uplifts ES and ITSI.

Enterprise Security (ES) 8.0: The platform’s enhanced security and FIPS 140-3 compliance are intrinsic benefits for ES, strengthening the underlying SIEM infrastructure. ES 8.0 specifically features:
Streamlined threat detection and response: Enhancements simplify how security analysts detect, investigate, and respond to threats from a single interface.
Mission control integration: Native integration with Splunk Mission Control unifies security operations.
SOAR automation: Tighter, unified automation via Splunk SOAR for accelerated incident response workflows.
Federated analytics: Critically, Federated Analytics allows security data analysis wherever it resides, starting with Amazon Security Lake, breaking down data silos for comprehensive threat hunting and investigation.
Cisco Talos integration: Enhanced defense against threats via direct integration with Cisco Talos threat intelligence.

IT Service Intelligence (ITSI): ITSI benefits immensely from the performant data management and deep observability integrations in Splunk 10, enabling better service health and anomaly detection. Key improvements include:
Cisco ThousandEyes integration: New bidirectional integrations provide deeper visibility into network health, enabling unified observability and assurance to anticipate and remediate network-related service impacts.
EventIQ (AI-Powered): Leveraging Splunk AI, EventIQ drives cross-domain correlation, identifying business-critical issues and pinpointing root causes with plain-text explainability, even from network data (ThousandEyes, Catalyst, Meraki).
Unified observability experience: Splunk AppDynamics and Splunk Observability Cloud now offer a combined view of business impact for three-tier and microservice applications, streamlining IT troubleshooting.
Proactive anomaly detection: New capabilities like drift detection proactively identify incremental or sudden KPI changes (e.g., slow latency increases over months), preventing performance issues. Adaptive thresholding uses machine learning to dynamically adjust KPI thresholds based on historical behavior, reducing alert fatigue.
Simplified alert onboarding and data integrations: Guided workflows simplify the ingestion of alerts and event data from external monitoring tools, with expanded support for third-party data integrations.
Rules Engine queue mode: The Rules Engine now defaults to a queue processing system for notable events, improving efficiency and preventing latency issues in event correlation.
Enhanced backup and restore: Increased scope for backup files to include entity types, service analyzers, and saved episode reviews, with alerts for missing dependencies, ensuring robust disaster recovery for ITSI configurations.

In conclusion, Splunk 10.0 is not merely an incremental update; it’s a strategic evolution. It brings robust security hardening, a significant leap in data pipeline control with Edge Processor, and a comprehensive embrace of OpenTelemetry for end-to-end observability.

For those of us operating critical security and IT operations, these advancements mean a more stable, secure, and insightful platform for navigating the complexities of modern digital environments. It positions Splunk as a central nervous system for highly distributed, cloud-native architectures.

Want to see how Splunk frames it? You can check out their official announcement here.

And if you’re looking to get more out of your Splunk setup, or thinking about how these updates could fit into your environment, we are here to help.

At Trifork Security, we’ve been working with Splunk for over 16 years, and as an elite partner, we know how to turn new features into real value for security and IT teams.

Feel free to reach out if you’d like to talk more.