Being held as a virtual conference, Splunk's .conf21 launched yesterday with a media conference to announce major updates to the platform.

Doug Merritt, president and CEO, Shawn Bice, president of products & technology and Teresa Carlson, chief growth officer were on the call to offer their thoughts.

Following opening comments from Merritt, we were treated to a number of announcements.

Bice offered the first major improvement, saying "Customers tell us, 'hey, when I'm ingesting data, it would be really nice if I could redact information as it's being ingested, or if I could filter it'." So, with that in mind, Bice announced Ingest Actions to achieve exactly that, and more.

The next announcement looked at the disperse environments that many customers face. Bice noted, "customers will say, 'I'm in multiple clouds, so I have data that could be in Azure, in AWS or Google; they'll also say, I'm [also] on-premise and I have data across this whole environment. So, I'd love to be able to search that from a consolidated search bar'. This exists - it's called Federated Search which will allow you to search for your Splunk data wherever it may be."

Next, Bice outlined the age-old problem of head-count caps and shrinking budgets in the internal security teams, again paraphrasing customers, "wouldn't it be great if you could auto-detect… instead of me configuring the alerts… if you know the environment… what if you used some sort of template so you could look at my operational data and auto-detect things - that means I don't need human beings to do that'. So we build Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring, or Auto-Detect, but It really about the system learning and being more intelligent on behalf of customers.

Finally, Carlson spoke to the demands from customers for more flexible pricing. "The new workload pricing is a result of us listening and now giving all of our cloud customers the availability for workload pricing. What that means is that customers don't have to worry about ingest, they can ingest as much as they want, because what's important to them is to get the data in and then complete their searches to find the data - the needle in the haystack. We immediately saw customers start to expand their use-cases."

We continue to watch the on-line event and may bring more if has interest to readers.