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Get started with Splunk Observability Cloud 🔗

This topic covers five high-level steps you can follow to get started with Splunk Observability Cloud and its products, which include Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring, Splunk Application Performance Monitoring (APM), Splunk Real User Monitoring (RUM), or Splunk Log Observer.

For an introduction to Observability Cloud products, see Welcome to Splunk Observability Cloud.

For information about how these products can be used together to address real-life use cases, see Scenario: Kai troubleshoots an issue from the browser to the back end using Splunk Observability Cloud.

Follow these steps to set up and make the most of Observability Cloud:

This diagrams provides a high-level view of the 5 steps to getting started with Observability Cloud.

1. Create a plan and set up your organization 🔗

Before you start, create a plan for how you want to set up your Observability Cloud organization. For information about how to plan for and set up your Observability Cloud organization, see Set up and administer Splunk Observability Cloud.

2. Get data into Observability Cloud 🔗

Gather all the data from your environment in Observability Cloud to achieve full-stack observability. For information about how to get data in, see Get data into Splunk Observability Cloud.

As a part of getting data in, make sure to consider bringing in data in a way that allows Related Content in Splunk Observability Cloud, a feature that automatically correlates data between different views within Observability Cloud. When turned on, the Related Content bar displays automatically when a you select a relevant element and lets you take a data-driven investigative approach.

To learn more about Observability Cloud’s data model, refer to Data types in Splunk Observability Cloud.

3. Explore and analyze your data 🔗

Once you have data coming into Observability Cloud, it’s time to do some exploring. For example, you can:

  • Use Infrastructure Monitoring to analyze the performance of cloud services, hosts, and containers, or view the health of your infrastructure at a glance, and view outlier conditions in your hybrid infrastructure.

  • Use APM to analyze the performance of applications down to the microservice level, investigate latencies in your application requests, and monitor inbound and outbound dependencies for each service.

  • Use RUM to analyze the performance of web and mobile applications and keep track of how users are interacting with your front-end services, including page load times and responsiveness.

  • Use Log Observer to pinpoint interesting log events and troubleshoot issues with your infrastructure and cloud services.

  • As described in step 2. Get data into Observability Cloud, if you turned on Related Content in Splunk Observability Cloud when setting up your data integrations, you can click options in the Related Content bar to seamlessly navigate between APM, Log Observer, and Infrastructure Monitoring with your selected filters and context automatically applied to each view.

  • Use the mobile app to check system critical metrics in Observability Cloud on the go, access real-time alerts with visualizations, and view mobile-friendly dashboards.

4. Set up alerts and customize your experience 🔗

Now that you’ve explored and familiarized yourself with the data you have coming into Observability Cloud, set up detectors to issue alerts about your data and customize your Observability Cloud experience.