The time has finally come for us to bring Splunk(x) to the far reaches of the galaxyworld. I got a call from our Fed team requesting Splunk(x) monitors in our Bethesda, MD office so they could show off how we use Splunk to our public sector opportunities and customers. Always eager to go take awesome photographstravel for work, I happily obliged and you can see the results after the break.

I was thrilled to be a part of this year’s worldwide user’s conference showcasing what we’ve done with Splunk(x) and hinting about where we’re going with it. I had the privilege of presenting a session and a Splunkbase lab on how we use Splunk within Splunk. We showcased several of the dashboards I presented in my last blog post on Splunking the Enterprise (which was far too long ago) and highlighted how we’re using SalesForce.com data mashed against our machine data.

It’s been a while since our last update on Splunk(x)! We’ve been busy working out the architecture to get to a point where we can implement NOC-like dashboards above our IT/ops space in our San Francisco office. We had a continual crowd around the Splunk(x) monitors for the first week in operation! They’re one of the first things people see when entering the office and are a great conversation piece. More importantly, the team sitting beneath them has only to look up to see a complete status snapshot of business application, infrastructure, website, and even Splunk(x) itself!

Of course, really important bits are still fired off in real-time through Splunk alerting and herein lies much of the value of…

Looking forward to being on a panel at the upcoming Cloud Analytics Conference on April 25 to represent Splunk and opportunity of mining big data for the enterprise.  Will be contrasting Business Intelligence with Operational Intelligence.

During my career I’ve been around for the dramatic growth of the market for BI tools and now BI services.  In the beginning of the BI era, large capital projects were necessary to deliver needed functionality, as the industry for BI was still reaching maturity, and it would be some time before these processes were made more streamlined, and the data democratized. At this point, in the new millennium, the majority of CIO’s I know embrace BI solutions that…

One of the more recent use cases for which we’ve begun using Splunk(x) is website availability monitoring. It’s not enough to know that our web server is up—we want to know that it’s able to properly serve requests within tolerances of response time, bytes received, and HTTP status code expected.

One of the first and most beloved series of dashboards used at Splunk internally were created by R&D and product management teams, deriving a number of statistics from the downloads of Splunk software from our website.  The apache log provided the primary raw information for these dashboards, which were enriched and used to show download activity globally, by version, platform, and by country, and geo.  These have been the business analytics used to gain insight into the distribution of our products around the world.

Since taking on the new roll out of Splunk internally, the IT team has been working to set up a series of charts that focus more on operational metrics – the up time of the service,…

The most requested information since my last Splunk(x) blog post was regarding the VMware environment. I would like to take a few moments to describe the Splunk(x) virtualization stack and the Splunk environment.

Our production VMware cluster is hosted in our private cloud at Equinix. The cluster consists of 8 ESX hosts with 12 cores and 96GB RAM for a total of 96 CPU cores and 768 GB RAM. Splunk(x) shares this environment with our production web infrastructure serving almost everything on splunk.com.

Hi there! My name is Paul and I manage Splunk’s (the company) use of Splunk (the product). I come from a background of web development, web analytics, and Linux administration so I’m no stranger to digging through logfiles when things go wrong. With Splunk, I can do this more quickly and elegantly.

Splunk(x) is our internal, enterprise deployment of Splunk. Splunk consists of 10 virtualized indexers, 3 virtualized search heads, a deployment server, a couple of heavy forwarders, and dozens of light and universal forwarders. We’re splunking our website, firewalls switches, F5 load balancers, *NIX and Windows OS logs, Active Directory, and SalesForce.com objects.

The first major goal with Splunk(x) was getting it deployed, onboarding…

We took a new corporate instance of Splunk into production last fiscal year, via the efforts of Paul Stout, my manager of Splunk applications, and the team who worked with him from our IT operations and professional services departments. The facilities group just ringed the office space with monitors to display some of the key dashboards we use on a daily basis to monitor and manage our assets. We are rolling out the Splunk App for Enterprise Security 2.0 and the latest app for VMware, and these have been major developments on our road map.

Had a nice reminder of how a passion for Splunk so often starts with someone from an operations trying to solve a specific problem and…

Looking forward to a Harvey Nash webinar next week, October 27 1p.m. ET/10 a.m. PT.  The title is “The Big Opportunities of Big Data”

We will be discussing the opportunity CIO’s have to innovate at their company by harnessing the power of digital machine data living and growing under their many business applications, systems, networks, and related infrastructure.  Please join us by registering here!

Presenters: Anna Frazzetto, SVP of Technology Solutions, Harvey Nash and Doug Harr, CIO, Splunk

When: October 27, 2011 1p.m. ET/10 a.m. PT

Length: One hour, including Q&A

For: CIOs, CTOs and VPs of Technology responsible for driving performance, innovation and revenue results

What You’ll Take Away:
• What big data is and…