Blogs: Leena Joshi

If you’re participating in our beta program for the Splunk App for VMware, and are upgrading to vSphere 5 shortly, we have good news for you. We’ve released an updated beta with support for vSphere 5!

You may be wondering—what have we heard from our beta customers so far?

The first thing we hear is, “Wow, this is a lot of data!”—and it is. One of the reasons for this, is that we pull metrics data directly from the ESX hosts and with a much deeper level of granularity than is available with vCenter.

“What’s the use of this deeper level of granularity? ”, you might ask

Well—have you had that experience as a user of VMware virtual machines, where…

The Splunk App for VMware is now in beta. It has been one of our most popular requests and a much-searched-for app. Why? Because virtualization, as much as it allows resources to be shared more efficiently, also leads to problems being shared! Splunk customers want to be able to tie user level or application level problems with the underlying server, storage, network or virtualization layers. They want a way to make those connections easily and at scale.

Splunk 4.3 is now out and for a minor release it packs an elephant-sized punch! Our continuing emphasis on enhancing usability means that Splunk reaches more and more users on a daily basis. There are also subtle features we continue to add to make data exploration simpler and faster.

One exciting example is the new feature we added that makes structured data formats like XML/JSON easier to navigate within Splunk. While Splunk could always ingest XML/JSON data easily, navigating the nested hierarchical structure of these data formats was not intuitive.

With 4.3, we handle this data much better. Not only did we add color coding for fields within the hierarchy, we also added a search command…

Last week, the Splunk team was at VMworld Copenhagen on a very exciting mission- Monitoring Labcloud, VMware’s private cloud environment that runs all the labs at VMworld. The Splunk team had taken on the task of providing end to end visibility across a subset of VMware’s Labcloud environment. The technology tiers that Splunk was monitoring including LabCloud(a custom app), VMware vCloud Director, VMware vSphere, VMware vCenter Server, NetApp storage and networking devices in the environment. The environment was enormously dynamic with virtual machines being spun up and spun down; host configurations changing frequently. Needless to say, Splunk performed with flying colors! Some of our key wins:

1. In a cloud environment, a lot of the provisioning and de-provisioning is delegated

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At two full house SplunkLive events in London and Amsterdam, it quickly became obvious that the Splunk fan following in Europe is turning into a serious sized storm. SplunkLive London opened to a full session of 200+ attendees at the Tower Hotel. After a lively Splunk introduction by CEO Godfrey Sullivan, came presentations from Betfair.com, Tesco.com and a consultant on behalf of a rather large London summertime sports event that involves grass courts.

Betfair.com, the world’s largest betting exchange runs thousands of bets per second and uses Splunk extensively across 5 different datacenters. Representing Betfair was Will Thames, the product delivery technical lead. Betfair started using Splunk to centralize their logging, and to make it easier for customer support to…

We are very gratified by the level of interest we are getting in Splunk for virtualization. We presented to a packed session at .conf2011 and attendees got access to the preview of our upcoming Splunk for VMware app.  For those who weren’t at the session, we are working on expanding the preview gradually and you will get updates as the first round of feedback starts coming in.

If you’re going to be at VMworld, you have another chance to see what Splunk has to offer for virtualized environments. Our session is: Achieve End to End Visibility in Large Scale Virtual/Private Cloud Environments #SPO3991 on Monday at 12.30pm.

Capturing virtualization data in Splunk, persisting and analyzing it can give you…

An emerging generation of developers and cloud consumers don’t want delayed gratification. They expect everything they need available as a service. They want easy turn-on/turn-off. They want to pay based on usage. To meet the needs of this new class of customers, we re-worked our familiar classic Splunk into a brand-spanking-new cloud service called Splunk Storm!

Among the many email responses to my Splunk for VMware blog post, several were from people deploying thousands of virtual desktops in their environment, wondering how to get enough visibility to be able to troubleshoot user issues. Will Hayes started working on this virtualization problem a few months ago, for Citrix Xendesktop and his blog describes the deep levels of visibility our Splunk for XenDesktop solution provides.

We’re showcasing this solution at Microsoft Management Summit this week and are pretty excited to see the levels of interest and enthusiasm around this new solution. For those who are running VMware View, we don’t have a solution yet, but can provide some (hopefully helpful) pointers.

VMware View consists of…

One of my favorite parts about attending a SplunkLive! event is hearing Splunk users talking to one another about their experiences. Watching people from similar industries interact and talk about different uses of Splunk and seeing that twinkle in their eyes when a moment of discovery crosses their face…“Wow, Splunk can do that?” It makes me smile every time.

SplunkLive! Boston featured presenters from two long-term customers. First, Steven Maresca, from University of Connecticut talked about how Splunk was able to help the University meet PCI, HIPAA and other compliance mandates related to specific fields of research. Splunk helps them to meet log retention mandates, dashboards make audits easier for auditors, and SSO ensures…

One of the great pleasures of working at Splunk is when customers get really specific about WHY WHY WHY they Splunk. We love it.

Sondra Russell is a metrics analyst at large public multimedia organization, with some rather famous radio shows and podcasts that I am a huge fan of.

She was very candid in her talk at the Baltimore SplunkLive! – she’d tried out the leading software for web analytics and had to follow a rather convoluted process to get her weblogs in. She had to decide upfront what data from her weblogs was needed vs not, she had to then format the logs so they fit the prescribed format and then upload the logs to the software. The…