Blogs: .conf Speakers

Did you know that my data mames me healthier? Yeah, I exported my year-long history of daily caloric intake, weight measurements, and amount of water consumption from my LiveStrong.com account and splunked it all.

The best way to learn where your data can take you is by talking to other Splunk users. And the best place to speak with other Splunk users is at .conf2012: The 3rd Annual Splunk Worldwide Users’ Conference.

You might have the chance to speak with Eddie Satterly. He got two promotions using Splunk. Luke Harris landed a new job after flexing his Splunk skills. Sondra Russell found loads more time to do more interesting analysis. Bob Beard found a way to monitor his Enterprise Monitoring System. Michael Wilde found the best music shows at SXSW. Nick Key is finding where in the world his friends are by mashing Facebook data with…

Last month I wrote about indexing video feeds and Vimeo was the site I featured for HD videos. The idea was to use the Vimeo REST API to gather all the meta data about your favorite Vimeo HD video channels and then index this into Splunk for historical look up or simply to have it available as a one stop dashboard where you can not only view the information that got indexed, but also use a workflow action to actually view the video.

Then, what happened was that the REST API called from Python changed in that I was getting one huge line per channel instead of nicely formatted XML. My code had logic to skip all lines…

Last month over 600 customers, partners and developers from 31 countries came to San Francisco to .conf2011: The 2nd Annual Splunk Worldwide Users’ Conference. Major themes of the conference included big data, the cloud, new Splunk apps and Splunk as a developer platform.

Attendees could select sessions from five tracks and more than 50 breakout sessions. The keynote session wowed the audience with new apps (like Splunk for Microsoft Exchange, Splunk for Web Intelligence, Splunk on Splunk, The Splunk Performance Test Kit, and the Splunk for VMware beta), showed how we’re making it easy to develop apps on Splunk (new Python SDK!), unleashed the new Splunk Storm™ cloud-based service, and encouraged users to…

I can’t believe that it has already been over 3 weeks since .conf 2011.  It was a great event.  For the developer platform, we have begun starting to work with a few startups that are doing interesting work on top of Splunk.  I wanted to quickly highlight two of those who spoke at our packed, standing room only developer platform roadmap session during the conference.

First, Pamela Roussos from AppFirst demoed the work that AppFirst has been doing using our new Python SDK. AppFirst is combining Splunk’s real-time processing and search capabilities with their deep, constant data collection between the O/S and application.  You can read more about their demo in the AppFirst blog.  Thanks to Pamela…

(This post was written by Dan Woods, CTO and Editor of CITOResearch.com.)

Last week, while at the Splunk .conf 2011, I did a research experiment and asked conference attendees to explain Splunk in one sentence. (See “Explaining Splunk in One Sentence”).

I did my experiment on the first day of the conference before hearing the vision for the product at the keynote sessions. The question I will answer in this blog is: “What are people likely to say Splunk is in 2012 after the company has spent 12 months executing toward its vision?”

To set the stage for my predictions, I would like to explain what I learned about the challenging task of explaining Splunk during my three days…

Our goal is to create an ecosystem of developers around the world targeting Splunk as a platform.  A critical enabler is to have developer focused content and resources that establishes what you can do with Splunk.

Here is a quick recap of the developer platform announcements that we made at this year’s user conference.

Developer Focused .conf2011 Announcements

• New Python SDK Preview. Hosted on GitHub  – https://github.com/splunk/splunk-sdk-python We are providing the SDK as open source and are offering a lot of examples, command line utilities and example applications to get you up and coding a lot faster and with fewer lines of code.
• Updated REST API Documentation.  This update to the REST documentation marks our most extensive documentation yet

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As a Splunk partner specializing in Federal deployments, one question Aplura consultants are repeatedly asked by our clients is “Can I use Splunk to check our events for matches against a watchlist of IP addresses or domain names?”. Of course, the answer is “yes” watchlists can be configured, leveraging Splunk’s “lookup” functionality, and then used in searches to find and alert on matches. Splunk makes this pretty easy. Find more on lookups in the Splunk docs.

Implement Watchlists as Lookups in Splunk
For many of our clients, managing the lookup tables can be challenging The watchlist gets downloaded, perhaps reformatted, then uploaded to the Splunk server, where it can be used as a lookup table. In some situations, however,…

If you attended my technical presentation @ the Splunk 2010 users.conf event last called “Splunking Outside The Box“, then you’re probably aware of just how esoteric my thinking can be when it comes to creatively leveraging Splunk for the more non-sensible, yet highly educational use cases.

For example, I showed-off my Splunk for Texas Lotto App, which my team here @ Splunk uses each month to pick our “winning” numbers.

So far, we’ve won about $26…but we’ve spent ten times that amount along the way. But that’s beside the point.

Anyway, at this year’s conference I am hoping to avoid those everyday boring run-of-the-mill searches and get you thinking outside the box yet again.

Yes, I…