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“Serendipity is looking in a haystack for a needle and discovering a farmer’s daughter” – Julius Comroe

I just read the quote in a presentation from Matt Jones of BERG at the DXf conference. There is so much i love about this presentation i don’t know where to start. Just click through it ( embedded below ) and have your own reaction. It’s clearly designed to be a fun/light read. I think I clicked at about one slide per few seconds. Then went back and stopped on a few that really spoke to me. It was entertainment that made me think which then made me smile.

At its heart, splunk is a time machine. It allows someone to go back in time and…

On what was an incredibly beautiful day we had more than 100 Splunk devotees attend our first ever SplunkLive event in Seattle last week. In the shadow of Microsoft we talked about our Windows and Microsoft strategy and compare notes with lots of customers that are running mixed Microsoft, Linux, Solaris environments. Many of our customers with Microsoft Active Directory, Exchange and SharePoint environments are utilizing Splunk to troubleshoot problems and implement security and compliance controls in large-scale, distributed environments. But, I’m still surprised at how little Microsoft .NET we’re seeing in production large-scale applications.

Three Seattle-based customers presented their views on managing mission critical applications, IT data consolidation and Splunk.

• T-Mobile USA
• Blue Nile
• Washington State University

T-Mobile USA

Sean White, Senior Engineer with…

When most people first come across Splunk, the first set of users associated with it naturally become operations, security, or compliance personnel. Splunk naturally lends itself for their use. I was speaking to some software engineers explaining what Splunk does and the connection for how it could be used for their engineered Service Oriented Architecture applications did not come immediately. I told them that one of Splunk’s T-Shirts reads “Be an IT Superhero. Go Home Early.” At that point, I got their interest.

Let’s get back to the basics for one of the reasons Splunk exists, which applies to not only SOA, but also to all phases of multi-tier deployment. The typical developer may be involved in multiple stages of SOA…

Every week i run into someone that is having performance issues and they are not aware you can just add another server or two or ten. I’ll travel to meet a company and I’ll ask how many servers they are using for Splunk to search/index/report on a terabyte a day. They will say a couple. I’ll then ask how many they have for a similar sized hadoop or data warehouse project. They will say 50 to 100X that number. Look if your going to give these systems 300+ servers, can we please get 15?

Somehow there is a breakdown in our communication that we scale like all other good architectures.

The following are hopefully some easy pictures to help tell the story.…

I was in a meeting last thursday where some “important-people” ( not sure if they want to be named ) dropped the D word ( “disruptive” ) several times. They were presenting a slide that proved-out an age-old (1994?) adage that the key to success is ( can be ) a disruptive business model. It’s one thing for professor Christensen to talk about it, and another when its bankers have a slide for it. Personally I need to be reminded of its importance every day, since being disruptive was one of the most important guiding principals when founding Splunk. As we grow, and become more established, i hope we continue to be a disruptive leader – it certainally faces constant tension.

Hearing…

How people use Splunk is often a surprise to us – at least they are going beyond our original intent. Initially we thought of splunk as a search engine for log files, Google for your logs if you will, to help IT folks troubleshoot their complex systems. Quickly we found that users started Splunking config files, network packets, source code, email, etc. Over the years our customers have been dragging us into all sorts of new uses-cases like global windmill power plant data analysis, protein structure prediction, or just something simple like analyzing user behavior on a website.

Last Thursday, three more of our coolest customers spoke at SplunkLive in Seattle to talk about IT challenges in general and the ways Splunk helps them to be more effective.

Blue Nile is using Splunk for all the basics–application and network troubleshooting, recognizing and blocking security threats, transaction tracking, PCI compliance and the like. BUT, they are also tracking web statistics and clickstream metrics to understand which partners are accessing which new applications and programs so they can focus development and marketing efforts where it really matters.

Washington State University is an interesting case as well. An Oracle database administrator got that team going. He knew he couldn’t really monitor the health of his database unless he understood the health of his entire…

Are you in town for Oracle Open World? Do something fun AND productive with your time in SF–swing by the Splunk offices and join us for a beer. Meet with dev or support, tell us what works and what doesn’t, and maybe even record a video to tell us how you’re using Splunk.

We love it when customers swing by. We get feedback on how they’re using Splunk in their environment, roadmap feedback and enhancement requests–and they love it too–they get first hand access to our support team to work through issues or understand best practices. Recently we’ve hosted Macy’s, VeriSign, Edmunds.com, Cisco, Lawrence Livermore National Labs and nTelos.

We’re only a few blocks away from Moscone at 2nd St at Brannan. Email…

Tim Jones of Agora Games posted a good summary of his experience with Splunk. Tim reveals what we’ve known for some time. Splunk is incredibly flexible and powerful but sometimes finding the Splunk documentation to do exactly what you want isn’t as easy as it should be.

We’ve struggled over the years to keeping our documentation both up to date and easy to use. Earlier this year we moved to a wiki based approach to Splunk documentation in hopes of keeping it more up to date and usable with inter-documentation links. Suffice to say we are still embryonic in our use of wiki technology as applied to documentation. We power our docs site with MediaWiki the PHP wiki technology that runs Wikipedia. Along the…

Last week Luke Kaines, The Master of Puppet, held a very well attended Puppet Camp here in SF. He drew a fantastic attendance from top notch companies – I was most impressed with the technical quality of the presentations and breakout sessions ( quality food too! ). These types of events can often be mundane or boring – this was not. Kudos to Luke for building a quality community.

I had the pleasure of meeting Luke some three years ago back at a BayLISA event where I saw him win over a tough audience with an early incarnation of Puppet. Its been fun watching him over the years deliver on that early promise and for continuing to win over a very tough crowd.

Recently…