Blogs: Michael Baum

Last Thursday Dave Schwartzburg and a few other Cisco security mavens attended SplunkLive Raleigh. The Cisco Computer Security Investigation Team (CSIRT) has been a applying Splunk to corporate security investigations for more than two years now and Dave was generous enough to share their experiences with us all. Joining Cisco presenting at the event was James Ervin of University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, a very knowledgeable Splunk customer. Patrick Ogden, Splunk Sales Engineer gave a rocking good demo of transaction tracing in a telco provisioning environment and Will Hayes, Splunk Sr. Solution Architect showed the latest Splunk for Cisco Security App being developed together with the Cisco CSIRT team.

Cisco CSIRT Team Dave Schwartzburg

Dave Schwartzburg is an Information Security Investigator and…

I stumbled upon this unexpected post from Chad Sakac of EMC talking about the VMware/EMC/Cisco collaboration.

For anyone who has spent their career on the start-up track in Silicon Valley this is not a novel story.

Isn’t it fantastic to see some large companies still have the mojo of entrepreneurship and fast moving initiatives that survive outside of the normal organizational structure?

While it remains to be seen how successful VCE, Acadia and Vblock will be, it sure is exciting to have the industry talking about radically new approaches to simplify computing! Here is a great post summarizing Vblock from Mark Bowker @ Enterprise Strategy Group. Now if we can only get access to that lab and get Splunk running on one of…

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…

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…

More than 300 people attended Splunk Live Taipei last week and our partners at Systex hosted an incredible show of Splunk use cases, customer speakers and hands-on labs. The Systex Splunk Lab provided attendees with the opportunity to use Splunk with CICS and IBM System z mainframe data, Windows, servers and desktops, Unix and Linux, customer service operations environments, telco provisioning environments and more.

I’ll be posting separately on the hands on the Systex Splunk Lab.

Our first guest customer speaker was Yi-Lang Tsai(蔡一郎) the Taiwan Chapter Chief Security Officer of the Global Honeynet Project and the Division Manager of the National Center for High-performance Computing, a Honeynet Project sponsor. Yi-Lang is also a freelance writer with more than 30 books published on operating systems,…

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…

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…

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…

I visited Sydney and Melbourne last week to host our first Splunk Live events in Australia. Its my first visit to Australia and I’m really blown away by the friendliness of the people we’ve met. And the “Australian for Grep” t-shirt finally had a proper home. Attendees at today’s event in Melbourne and Tuesday’s event in Sydney included an impressive list of current customers and partners and a number of new users evaluating Splunk for the first time including Telstra, Ericsson, InfoSys, Frontline Systems, Fujitsu, GE Capital Finance, Toll Holdings, Vanguard Investments and more. We owe a huge thanks to the team from Digital Networks Australia who sponsored the two events.

Martin Brown, A Large Australian Financial Services Company

In Sydney Martin Brown,…

Last week we continued our road show launching Splunk 4 through the Southwestern US in Phoenix, San Diego and Los Angeles.This was our second annual gathering of customers, partners and users and we had more than double the attendees at this year’s Splunk Live events. In the morning we held a three-hour hands on technical workshop. Attendees had the opportunity to install and configure Splunk 4 on their laptops or remote server and get one-on-one assistance from the Splunk team. Afternoon sessions and dinner focused on customer presentations. We’re very grateful to all the presenters who took time out of their busy days to share with everyone how Splunk is transforming their IT environments. I captured some notes from the…