NetMotion Wireless yesterday announced NetMotion Diagnostics 3.10, which lets enterprises and other customer access raw data from the solution to generate reports from third-party tools like Splunk, Elasticsearch and Kiwi, as well as supporting usage on iOS and Android platforms.

John Knopf, vice president of product management for NetMotion Wireless, said the latest version of NetMotion Diagnostics—formerly known as Locality—addresses a “big demand” from enterprise customers that have wanted the ability to generate their own reports from the data about their mobile devices gathered by NetMotion.

“Customers kept saying, ‘Give us your schema; we want to do our own custom reports,’” Knopf said during an interview with IWCE’s Urgent Communications. “As software developers, we’re really reluctant to give up our schema—and not because it is proprietary or that there’s something secret in there. But as soon as you let customers into your core database, they can impact performance. And, they’re going to write reports that [NetMotion Wireless] is going to break the next time we release an update, because you’re always changing your schema.”

“Then, we realized, ‘Hey, we can dump all of our data into Splunk, and Splunk knows how to just forge around it.’ That lets customers make their own charts, their own graphs and their own dashboards … This basically gives our customers access to every single bit of information that our system collects. We’re not holding anything back, so they can go analyze everything that they need to.”

With NetMotion Diagnostics 3.10, data from the software solution simultaneously is sent via syslog messaging to both the NetMotion server and to the Big Data product—be it Splunk or another application—so NetMotion’s core database is not disturbed, but customers have the data they need to develop their own reports, Knopf said. 

One advantage to this approach is that customers can get greater visibility into the performance of their networks sooner than they would by relying solely on the automatic reports generated by NetMotion Diagnostics, Knopf said.

“Splunk is much more of a real-time analysis tool,” he said. “When a device transmits information, it may not show up in our reports for a half an hour or so, depending on what’s going on. But, within Splunk, as soon as that device reports its data, we’ll automatically ship it off to Splunk, and Splunk can see it within seconds–literally.

“When you’re into troubleshooting and trying to diagnose what’s actively happening, it’s just a godsend. It’s absolutely what you need.”