Blogs: Christina Noren

There’s a big reason I haven’t blogged here for a while: Splunk 4. I’ve been so wrapped up in it for the last year that I haven’t really been interested in writing about anything else. Well, now it’s out, so I’m back! So I’ll kick it off with some background on why 4 is the Splunk I’ve always wanted and a little story about how my team and I have used Splunk ourselves in a new way the past few days.

The aspect of Splunk 4 that I’m most excited about is all of the ways that it makes IT data accessible to everyone, regardless of their job.

I’ve been a data fanatic since I started my first software company job 17…

Both Dave Pickering from New Aspects and I will be at the Atlassian Jira users’ group in San Francisco next Thursday September 18, for those of you who’ve been following what we’re doing with Jira to automate product management for an agile dev organization. Looks like a lot of great Bay Area companies are going to be there.

And we really, really, are just about ready to publish the extensions and workflows we’ve done.

Details and registration.

Are you planning on being at Interop in Vegas April 27-May 2? Do you use Splunk? If so, I’d love to hear from you.

I’ll be there with the Splunk video team and we’d love to record some new interviews with Splunk users. If you haven’t seen some of the user interview videos we’ve already done, check them out. They’re the best way to learn about how Splunk’s getting applied in the real world.

Some of my favorites: Demetri Mouratis, Rhythm New Media, using Splunk as an IT data platform across business and operations teams; Allen Hecker and Mark Bronniman, the senior security analyst and senior unix admin at Weill Cornell Medical College, and Trevis Edgworth of Epsilon Data Management, using Splunk for…

Here’s the presentation that I gave this past Saturday at P-Camp, the unconference for product managers. If you’ve been following what we’re doing here with automating product management using Jira, there’s detail and screenshots in this presentation that might be interesting.

Harvard just learned security investigation 101 the hard way.

Harvard admitted yesterday that a web server was hacked a month ago that contained financial application data for over 10,000 applicants. They knew about the incident on February 15 and took down the server till February 21 in order to investigate and implement stronger security controls. Their announcement reveals how slow and ineffective security investigations often are.

“The University’s initial examination did not reveal the full extent of the hack. As the investigation continued, it became apparent that some sensitive applicant data, including Social Security numbers, could potentially have been accessed.”

Unfortunately, a day later, it was pretty obvious that over 6,000 applicants’ data had been compromised – CNet reports that all their personal data…

A few months ago I wrote about our effort to automate and open up product planning by implementing a process around distilling product inputs into requirements using Jira in support of an agile/scrum based development model. I’ve rarely had so much response to a post… dozens of product managers at companies large and small wrote me and commented about their own efforts along the same lines. Many asked for our specs on our Jira customizations.

We were at the beginning of this effort when I wrote that post. In the intervening 3+ months we’ve completed the first round of Jira customizations (thanks to lots of help from Dave Pickering and the team at New Aspects of Software, a fantastic consulting firm specializing…

Facebook is getting a lot of flak in the press (latest in the Register) about reports on a gossip blog about some pretty serious privacy holes:

1. anyone that works there can look at anyone’s private profile

2. anyone who works there can look at logs of what other profiles any user has seen.

If Facebook wants to turn their act around, or any other social networking site wants to avoid being in their position, they’d better pay attention to some best practices around securing and reviewing IT data.

Here’s what best practice would say about Facebook’s two problems.

The first problem – anyone can look at any customer’s data – is classically the kind of thing that has brought on regulations in other industries, such…

This is a fun trend for us here at Splunk – more and more job descriptions are listing Splunking skills as a plus. Really rewarding for those of us who’ve been here since before the 2005 beta!
Here are a few jobs that want you to know your Splunk:

• Senior Security Administrator at Bloomberg L.P. in New York.
• Linux Systems Administrator at LiveOps in Palo Alto. (Cool company by the by!)
• Senior Unix Systems Admin at Success Factors in San Mateo.
• NOC Supervisor at SWN Communications in Schenectady, NY
• Sr. IT Security Analyst at Etech Hi in Greenville, TX

Got any more? Post ‘em in the comments!

The PM and engineering teams are embarked on an interesting experiment here at Splunk. While we’ve always leveraged the support case system to track enhancement requests and automate some of the input end of the product management process, the real meat of product definition has happened pretty much as it does anywhere – via product requirements documents (PRDs) written by PMs and answered by a variety of technical specifications, bugs and tasks in the engineering tracking system, emails, whiteboard sessions, etc.

OK, it’s Splunk, so the PRDs and tech specs have always been on the corporate wiki so there’s some measure of collaboration. Anyone in the company could go up there and have a look at what was in progress. But…

I’ve been posting occasionally when there’s some huge meltdown of a big service like the two recent Blackberry outages. My point is usually that the systems are too complex so the failure mode is usually unpredictable and hard to track down – hence the sputtering of PR people days after big outages while sysadmins are frantically digging through logs, configs and system metrics all over the place.

Anyway, looks like the NYT picked up on the same idea. Good article citing recent outages at United and Skype and tying them into the larger problem of increasing system complexity.

It quotes Andreas Antonopolous, who’s been one of the analysts to really understand why IT Search is necessary in the face of increasing chaos and…