Splunk support engineer extraordinaire Deep Bains will be building and projecting dashboards in the NOC to track what’s happening at the show. In the past we’ve identified network latencies and dictionary attacks. What will happen this year?

If you haven’t registered yet, you can get a free expo pass or $300 off your conference pass with this code: CNLUNY05. The offer is good until November 15.

And as always, I want to hear your stories about how Splunk’s making a difference in your IT environment. Stop by and brag to me about your latest IT ninja moment or your idea for a rad Splunk t-shirt slogan.

The oldest state university is using Splunk for all the basics–log consolidation, email tracing, operational troubleshooting and as a SIEM in conjunction with IDS and IPS tools. Learn how the university is using Splunk to enhance operational effectiveness, and how one system administrator built the case to fund and deploy Splunk across the largest IT group in the university.

We’ll also hear from Cisco’s CSIRT (Security Incident Response Team). They use Splunk to combat malware across more than 65K desktops. Once they detect and remedy potential issues, Splunk’s reports help them to keep tabs on trends and provide dashboards to IT management.

After the event, I’ll post a full review, but if you’re in the Raleigh Durham area, have friends there, or are able to get over there, join us. In addition to chatting with other customers, there’s an afternoon hands-on session to give your implementation an extra boost.

Details here or Short URL: http://bit.ly/23Vv15

We love it when customers swing by. We get feedback on how they’re using Splunk in their environment, roadmap feedback and enhancement requests–and they love it too–they get first hand access to our support team to work through issues or understand best practices. Recently we’ve hosted Macy’s, VeriSign, Edmunds.com, Cisco, Lawrence Livermore National Labs and nTelos.

We’re only a few blocks away from Moscone at 2nd St at Brannan. Email me to let me know you’re coming for a visit: erin AT splunk DOT com.

We’ll have the Boddington’s (in the new nitrogen kegerator!), Trumer Pils and Widmer Hefe on tap.

Hope to see you!

To keep that momentum going, we’re introducing 40 days of Splunk 4.0. Each day for the next few weeks someone from the Splunk team will author a blog post detailing a cool new feature, highlighting a fun mashup, or sharing something interesting we’re working on or building for a customer. As always, we’d like you to contribute to the conversation as well, so feel free to leave a comment or shoot me an email to share your tip, search or story and we’ll send you some limited edition Splunk 4 launch schwag.

And since we’re Splunk and we want to overdeliver, we’ll start you off with two posts–check out Christina Noren, our VP Products 4.0 insights.

And I think the Interactive Field Extractor, or IFX is pretty handy. IFX helps you teach Splunk how to extract fields from your data so you can then report on and analyze them. Check out this short video or read more in the docs to start using IFX straight away.

Remember to watch for the tag “40 days of Splunk 4.0″ and start adding to your bag o’ tricks. It should be fun.

Happy Splunking!

The Splunk crew has been working away to bring you something even better than the Splunk you already know and love. Join us tomorrow as we unveil Splunk 4.0.

Register to join us: https://splunk.webex.com/splunk/onstage/g.php?t=a&d=595539039

Splunk> 4 the win!

We’ve been having some great success stateside recently at Splunk, but the fun doesn’t stop there. Oh no. We have good news from the land of the rising sun…Splunk won Best of Show at Interop Tokyo. If you can read Japanese, you can read more about it here.

Later this week I’ll recap our SplunkLive South Africa events.

Even the White House is paying greater attention to digital security threats as President Obama looks to appoint a cybersecurity coordinator.

Bottom line: you need to make time, or spend the money to ensure your networks and information are secure.

Good news, John Sawyer at DarkReading has done a nice job detailing a few free/ inexpensive solutions in his article Free SIM Tools Save Money — And Maybe Your Data.

Give it a read. Then download the free version of Splunk and check out either Splunk for OSSEC, Splunk for Network Security, or both. And again, you can read more on Splunk for OSSEC in the blog post from Dale Neufeld at Protus IP Solutions.

But it’s not just security where Splunk puts more hours in your day … Splunk is one product with many uses, the only limit is your imagination. Customers are using Splunk for application troubleshooting, change management, network management, server management, virtualization management, PCI, SOX and FISMA compliance.

I spoke with David Abbott, Infrastructure Management Analyst from ACS just this week, and he told us Splunk enables their service desk people to handle and troubleshoot customer issues 30X faster (1 minute to get the info they need instead of 30 minutes previously.) That sounds like a pretty good metric to me. How will you use Splunk? And what will your time savings be?

Happy Splunking!

1) Congrats to our lovely and talented Erik Swan, named among the Top 25 CTO’s for 2009. We knew it all along, but great to have InfoWorld recognize him as well. Yay Boss!

2) 7 of our customers are also on the list! A few we can mention include Peter Balnaves, CVS Caremark; Stephen Herrod, VMware; Judith Spitz, Verizon Business; Aber Whitcomb, MySpace

3) Last week we beat out 1200 other nominees to win the TiE50 for the Internet Infrastructure category. The TiE 50 honors the top 50 startup companies that are leaders in innovation, ingenuity, and show excellence in management. Our Chief Architect and Co-founder Rob Das was on hand to receive the award.

4) DiscussIT’s IT Security Pubcast produced a nice overview of Splunk. Give it a listen–or share it with your friends who haven’t yet drunk the Splunk Kool-Aid.

5) SplunkLive, is our roadshow-like event series where we send executives out to different cities across the country and pair them with local customers to highlight various use cases for Splunk. We’ve got 4 coming up in the next 2 weeks!

This Thursday, June 4, join us for SplunkLive San Jose at the Fairmont to see:

• The operator of the world’s largest retail electronic payments network and one of the most recognized global financial services brands, LeRoy Isaac, Senior Network Engineer, uses Splunk for network security monitoring and incident response.
• 2Wire provides intuitive customer experiences for broadband carriers nationwide. Faisal Khan, Security Architect, will detail how his operations and security team rely on Splunk to identify and resolve issues, and conduct forensic investigations.
• Genius.com is the only true SaaS solution in the marketing automation space. Zaid Ali, Director, Technical Operations, is using Splunk across the infrastructure for application troubleshooting and network and security management.

Next Tuesday, June 9, join us at the Fairlawns Boutique Hotel in Johannesburg, South Africa to chat with Wybrand Conradie, Development Manager at Vodacom - as he shares how using Splunk helps them solve their application management and IT infrastructure challenges.

Wybrand will join us again on Thursday, June 11, at The Spier Wine Estate in Cape Town, South Africa. If you’re on the continent, come say hi!

Rounding out the series is SplunkLive Denver, also on Thursday, June 11, at the Sheraton Denver Downtown Hotel. This time we’ll hear from:

• Lead Development Engineer Bill O’Brien shares how Splunk helps the leading local phone provider troubleshoot and secure the applications that keep more than 14 million customers connected and satisfied.
• Director of Information Security at a Fortune 500 financial services firm, shares how using Splunk helps them solve IT security and infrastructure challenges.

6) And rounding out recent highlights (not quite a Top 10 List) is this blog post HOWTO: Use Splunk as Your  Remote Syslog Server from Daniel Meissler. An outsider’s take on using Splunk.

But wait…this just in! Splunk for OSSEC, courtesy of Dale Neufeld. You can read about it here, or download Splunk for free, then go get the OSSEC app (also free).

Thanks for reading, and remember if you want to speak at a SplunkLive, build an app for the general Splunk community, or just tell us the awesome ways you’re using Splunk, hit me up: erin@splunk.com

Hope to hear from you soon!

The Telenor Group is a leading global provider of telecommunications services. The company serves 164 million subscribers representing a strong footprint in Central and Eastern Europe and Asia. As one can imagine, 164 million subscribers generate a lot of data. In Norway alone they manage 1000s of servers and routers spanning many different data centers. In short–they are heavily reliant on IT.

“We have a lot of data, a lot of tools, many groups of people, and too little communication between groups,” Henrik said. “This makes it difficult to investigate incidents as no one person or department holds the keys to all of the data needed to conduct a proper analysis.”

Challenge:

Telenor required greater visibility into their IT data silos, but needed the ability to control who could see what. After evaluating several log management vendors, they settled on Splunk, as it was open and easy to integrate into existing systems, scalable and was software rather than an appliance-based solution.

“Splunk helps us consolidate our tools. It’s scalable and very open so it can integrate to existing and in-house tools where necessary. Better yet, Splunk makes the data we capture in logs available to less technical staff who might not otherwise know what is relevant or where to look for it.”

Splunk in Action:

Most users monitor and troubleshoot issues incredibly fast with Splunk – and Telenor is no different.  The dashboards and ability to do ad-hoc reporting are key features they rely on, and today Telenor uses Splunk for network monitoring and troubleshooting situations. But Henrik was further excited about his ability to put the power of Splunk into the hands of lower level users.

For instance, he used Splunk to diagnose a kernel error on systems he did not have intimate knowledge of, while having a particular system expert diagnose the problem manually without Splunk. Both found the problem in minutes, but the system expert had full access to the servers, had worked on the systems over several months and knew exactly where to look. Henrik on the other hand did not require access to the systems to find the problem and did not really know what to look for. Opening the ability to do basic problem solving at lower levels, and sharing controlled access more broadly will provide Telenor with a big productivity advantage.

The empowerment theme carries over to dashboards and ad-hoc reporting as well. Telenor is using Splunk’s saved search and alerting features to easily construct dashboards covering any number of items—failed logins, firewall traffic by port, specific user activities—whatever is important to their organization at a given time. 

Henrik has used Splunk to map and understand what is normal for a given environment. Just understanding what’s typical helps Telenor to build smarter alerts and manage their systems in a proactive manner–when something spikes up or an unfamiliar pattern appears analysts can dig in … before a potential failure occurs.

“Today’s monitoring tools just tell you when something isn’t working. With Splunk we can examine historical data, and watch trends to pick up on warning signs before an outage occurs,” Henrik said.

Thanks Henrik! We look forward to helping your continued success—and we’ll keep the rest of you posted as Telenor develops new and exciting ways to apply Splunk to their IT environment.

Thanks for reading. If you’re using Splunk for something cool—let us know!

Best,

erin

Flavio has been using Splunk to ensure all transactions are successfully flowing through Snap-on’s ERP so that orders and invoices are processed and shipped without delay. He’s centralizing application logs from several proprietary applications and loves the fact that Splunk can ingest any type of data without custom parsers, or connectors.

Another speaker representing a Fortune 1000 company is using Splunk for NERC and SOX compliance. He’ll tell us how Splunk’s log centralization and ad-hoc reporting mechanism keeps the company compliant, and internal and external auditors happy.

Register here.

Hope to see you!