splunk>live!

By Bayle Emlein

Monzy Merza led off the 2016 Splunk>live! event by reminding attendees in Santa Clara—just down the street from Google headquarters—of current expectations regarding the connectivity by noting a quotation from Tom Goodwwin—TechTarget, 2015:

        Uber, the world's largest taxi company, owns no vehicles;

        Facebook, the world's most popular media owner, creates no content;

        Alibaba.com, the world's most valuable retailer, has no inventory;

        Airbnb, the world's largest accommod­ation provider, owns no real estate.

How do they do it? Efficient data management. And yes, the “splunk>” name of the company comes from “spelunking,” the sport of diving deep and exploring previously unknown caves. The idea of splunk is> to make machine data accessible, usable and valuable to everyone. Because data needs to be not only gathered but managed and

Splunk> lives behind Comcast and Dominoes Pizza so that customers get exactly they ordered, but also only what they ordered. Just as the smooth operations of your body and your day depend on background respiration and digestion processes, which in turn depend on background biochemical and electronic processes, so the smooth operation of communication, connectivity, and commerce depend on background data gathering, information management, and security

Javier Santoyo, Senior Director of Global Security Intelligence at Symmantec drove these points home with his favorite Splunk tee shirt mantra, “let my people know.” Give them the tools they need and then encourage them to develop creative solutions. While scalable architecture and event management are critical, the end user shouldn't have to care. Social Logging collaboration makes the difference at Symantic IT. With complex global systems, separate platform just to manage security is counterproductive. Instead, Social Logging coordinates time zone and actual event data into a single borderless storehouse of information. Siloed teams in different locations or different branches share information instead of spending time, money, and resources on solving the same problem over and over. Keep it simple and keep the bar of entry low so that users can take the basics and build out as needs grow. Can you say, “google” as a verb as well as a noun?

Alfred Wan went on to demonstrate how SAP uses splunk> to increase efficiency, gain engineering resources in real time by eliminating redundancies in trouble shooting in day-to-day operations. Efficient analysis can take highly redundant and heavy but necessary log entries to a light fingerprint entry that drives value for the team and for customers.

Scott Nash, VP Products, Marketo how do you to take all this data and make money. Marketo helps their customers interface with their customers, including but not limited to Panasonic, Microssoft, Eventbrite. Last year was the first year that advertisers spent more on digital than print and broadcast advertising because digital is interactive. A good platform provides scalability. A great one provides competitive advantage. Splunk> delivers the missing link: time-line and industry comparison benchmarks based on real-time updates. “IT” and “profit center” are now coordinated into a single operation.

The bottom one: the whole is greater than the sum of the data parts. Do you just want to play defense, or do you want to use splunk> to not only save time but to free your employees to ask new questions and build out your company?

Kevin Faulkner, Senior. Director, Product Marketing, Splunk summarized the mission as making machine data useful to everyone. Unlike traditional databases, Splunk uses schema at data read—rather than write—so it is easy to add more data and ask different questions on the fly. Any data, any source, any platform—on site or in the cloud—provides users scalability and a platform to grow at their own rate.

Packaged machine learning is incorporated into day-to-day operations. If someone on the team has the time and skills to build company-specific applications, custom machine learning is available to add even more value.

Elyssa Christensen, Senior Sales Engineer at Splunk demonstrated Splunk's clear, understandable graphic representation of the health and activity of a system using real time data access. She showed how to drill down to analytics to evaluate issues and anomalies that might indicate a system compromise and initiate an investigation.

In addition to the power of business analytics, Splunk monitors IoT devices to provide safety and security. Customers can get added value via support and resources at http://Splunk.com/community. You're not buying a product, you're buying a platform. As Kevin said, it's a Swiss Army knife, a tool you use for functions of your own design.

Bruce Penn, Splunk Senior Sales Engineer, and SalesEngineer Kelly Kitagawa demonstrated the features that differentiate Splunk: no back-end database to assemble as a prerequisite before starting to benefit from Splunk, relating to the ability to develop and use schema on the fly; there's no need to filter data: you can use it all, nevertheless Splunk gives rapid time to value along with agile reporting and analytics that employ real time architecture. The over 1200 applications based on Splunk may be the single most appealing option, since you not only have a library of pre-built apps but also templates you can individualize to your own needs. Some of the apps are provided by Splunk directly, some have been developed by other Splunk users.

Download a fully functioning Splunk account, with limited data usage. In just a few minutes you can build your own dashboard for analyzing your own site(s). If you're using your website to sell cookies to the neighbors, you might be able to skip the data analytics. If you're serious about building a business, you'll need to know how many hits you are getting, whether potential customers are buying or having an unsuccessful experience.