Blogs: CIO Blog

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…

For years we CIOs have been working with our teams to turn “data” into “information” and “information” into “intelligence.” We know how important it is for CIOs to lead our companies from reporting the past to monitoring the now, and even predicting the future.  This is our ultimate calling, and as luck would have it, we’ve just crossed into a new era where we can offer a new kind of analytics – an “operational intelligence” to our business customers.

We’ve spent the last 30 years perfecting the deployment and management of business application suites, from HRIS, to ERP, to CRP, and beyond. There is always more to do, but for many industries, these capabilities now approach “commodity” status. The new…

We CIO’s continually seek to refine the definition of our role, with an eye towards justifying the vaulted positions we hold and maximizing our impact on the success of the company. I’m always reminded of that line from the movie “Anchorman” where Will Ferrell‘s character Ron Burgundy is trying to impress the leading lady and says “I don’t know how to put this, but I’m kind of a big deal ….people know me.”  Comedy often comes with a shred of truth. Pick up any CIO related media, and you will inevitably find a lot of advice as to who we CIOs are – articles like “how to influence customers”, “how to gain competitive advantage”, and others…

Will be speaking Thursday, July 21, at a Netsuite panel as part of the webinar titled “Keys to Evaluating Cloud ERP.” At Splunk we graduated from our initial accounting package to Netsuite a couple of years ago, and are now expanding our implementation to establish legal entities globally, after completing a second study this year to determine that we are on the right platform for the company. ERP to us encompasses Financial business applications including core accounting modules, plus order entry. For these applications our primary concern was to select and implement comprehensive, secure, flexible, solid software that would last us 3-5 years and beyond as we grow rapidly, worldwide. Netsuite fit that profile and was…