Atlas Assessment is a powerful tool that comes packaged in the Atlas Core Element. Using Assessment, a Splunk Admin can have key visibility into the health of their Splunk Environment, and see how Atlas can solve issues and improve processes from top to bottom.
Assessment Requirements
- Run Atlas Assessment as an Admin for best results
- Run Atlas Assessment on an active, production Search Head for best results
Assessment Overview
The Assessment is separated into sections by headers, with each header correlating to an Atlas Theme. Each section contains the following segments:
- Help Text explaining what the Atlas Theme is focused on
- Questions related to Splunk Environment processes and goals
- KPIs found by analyzing the Splunk Environment
- Findings generated by analyzing question responses and the KPIs
Theme Summaries
What is Data Sprawl?
Data Sprawl in a Splunk environment refers to when Splunk Admins begin to lose visibility into what data is being ingested into Splunk, why it is being ingested, and how it is being used. Without proper care, Splunk Environments can become crippled by an imbalance of data ingest and data utilization. This means that you could be ingesting and storing data that is not giving you a valuable return on your investment in Splunk. This can lead to the worse impacts of Data Sprawl which include excessive Splunk license costs, longer triage times when issues arise, and mounting technical debt that Splunk Admins will have to deal with every day.
Search Performance
Optimal performance of your Splunk environment heavily depends on properly made and maintained scheduled searches. To maintain accurate visibility of data on your reports and dashboards, you must ensure that your search scheduler is performing optimally. A Splunk deployment with poor Search Performance leads to Splunk users experiencing long search queues, alerts failing to trigger, and an increased potential for inaccurate data on your reports and dashboards.
Data Awareness
Data Awareness helps you assess how well you understand the health of the data that’s coming into your Splunk environment. Data Awareness looks at the infrastructure bringing your data into Splunk, how much visibility you have when there is failure in your pipeline, and the health of your forwarder infrastructure. Splunk environments with poor Data Awareness have little knowledge or alert on the stability of their data pipelines. When this occurs, there is a chance that data is reported incorrectly, or critical alerts are missed.
Usability Gap
Splunk is a powerful platform that can achieve significant outcomes when used correctly. We define the Usability Gap as the distance between when your Splunk users first start using Splunk to when they begin to really start using the platform to achieve real outcomes. The first thing you need to understand is how your users are interacting with the platform today and if the level of activity is what you think it should be. The Atlas Application Suite comes with many tools that can help jumpstart your users so that they can start getting value out of your investment in Splunk quickly.
All Findings
At the bottom of the Assessment rests the final section, “All Findings”. This section combines the findings of all Atlas Themes and presents it in an exportable format.
