Dev:

(coming soon) The return of Splunk Free, as in Free Beer

Back several months, before the launch of 4.0, we were confronting at all the work ahead. As always, we had to make hard decisions about what is in and what is out. In 4.0 we had re-implemented much of the UI and a good chunks of the backend. With over 1000 paying customers and looking at a potentially challenging upgrade process and a huge testing task we needed to reduce risk to the schedule and product quality. It was a hard decision but we reduced the GA risk by pulling out the Free product until we GA’d and fixed most of the critical bugs. Our guess was that it would take 45-90 beyond the GA to get few maintenance releases out before we could test the free product.

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Splunk Live Washington DC 2009

Obama-nomics is highly visible in our nation’s capitol these days. The DC economy is humming as our tax dollars are hard at working fueling all kinds of government spending.With more than 100 attendees at Splunk Live on Thursday we certainly were not disappointed in our quest to help make all this growth in government more efficient! Managing large networks and security forensics were the hot topics of conversation at Splunk Live Washington, DC where everyone was treated to a trio of three incredible speakers.

Our first speaker was Andy Purdy, the Co-Director, International Cyber Center, George Mason University and the Former Acting Director, National Cyber Security Division (NCSD) and US-CERT Department of Homeland Security. Andy was a member of the White House…

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Splunk Live Princeton 2009

Wednesday and we’re at Splunk Live Princeton, NJ. What an awesome place. Princeton is home to a great university and some great culinary experiences. Check out Mediterra — an interesting mix of Italian and Spanish influences. Apparently it’s where all the Princeton parents treat their kids to dinner when they are in town. Next store to our venue was the great hope for the state of NJ — a new Governor. The current Governor has turned the state budget and tax base into toxic waste. Well things went much better for the more than 60 Splunk Live attendees in Princeton today, who gained insight into how a number of large Splunk customers keep their mission critical applications running in a time…

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Splunk Live New York 2009

This week we’re on the East Coast enjoying some fantastic customer presentations and roundtables at Splunk Live events in New York City, Princeton NJ and Washington DC. It’s Tuesday and we have more than 100 customers and Splunk users attending Splunk Live in midtown Manhattan. The vibe is electric as we’re being treated to awesome talks by IDT and New York Life. At lunch, long-term customer’s Bloomberg and AT&T joined the customer roundtable conversation.

Gabe Arnett, Senior Software Architect at Moody’s demonstrated how Splunk is being used to monitor and troubleshoot the Moody’s Analytics platform. Gabe has more than 15 years of building web applications in financial services, investment banking and e-Commerce. At Moody’s he’s responsible for global development team that develops…

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Enriching Data with DB Lookups (Part 2)

Today, I’m writing as a guest blogger for Bob Fox to create part 2 of enriching data with the Splunk lookup command. Bob had already created part 1, which describes in detail with an example how to use the lookup command to enrich data from external CSV files. Today’s topic builds on the lookup command usage showing how to enrich indexed data at search time using an external database.

To begin with, it is a fact of life that some event data or log data may not reside in files, may not be broadcast on network ports, or even be imported uniquely via a scripted input. This data may, for legacy reasons, reside in a database. The often cited use case in this…

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Splunk Ninja – Fields of Dreams

I spend a great deal of time using, learning and demonstrating Splunk, and recently I had some questions from users on “what can I do with fields?”, “how do i make them?”, “how do I tweak them?”. That inspired me to publish a new Splunk Ninja episode known as “Fields of Dreams”.

In this episode, Splunk Ninja gives an all out tour of “fields” in Splunk 4.0, how they work, how to use them, some tips and tricks as well.

The ability for Splunk to handle multiple data formats all in a single search index and do “search time field extraction” is unique to the marketplace.

Additionally, you’ll see me take fields and use them to assemble a transaction with Cisco PIX firewall…

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