Less than a week left for .conf and so many exciting sessions to write about. I hope you had the chance to read my other posts about how one of our customers will be discussing their usage of Splunk to think beyond application monitoring and also about the varoius tracks and sessions on Cloud, Virtualization.  We have breakout sessions on our new and recently launched VMware App that discuss installation, configuration, usage, best practices and case studies. There is one more session I believe you just shouldn’t miss out on while you’re attending .conf.

Rick Yetter (@superdadaz), from Apollo Group, a leading provider in higher education programs, is presenting on automation of Splunk alerting within the Cloud.…

SplunkLive Dallas was the perfect mix of up-and-coming Splunk users and veterans showing off some deep technical know-how.

A few highlights from the day:

Rachel Neal, Client Manager for Connectivity Services from DerbySoft kicked off the customer stories for the day. DerbySoft provides electronic distribution, reservation, financial, and marketing services for hotels and travel distributors. She supports 4 globally distributed data centers, with developers and customers all over the globe–needless to say it’s a challenging environment to manage. She was candid, funny and told a great story. (I happened to be at JCPenney to check out their holiday readiness war room the following day and they told me she was their favorite!) A few stories from Rachel:

• Developers used to pick and choose from the

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An emerging generation of developers and cloud consumers don’t want delayed gratification. They expect everything they need available as a service. They want easy turn-on/turn-off. They want to pay based on usage. To meet the needs of this new class of customers, we re-worked our familiar classic Splunk into a brand-spanking-new cloud service called Splunk Storm!

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…

I was in town for SplunkLive Orange County this week, so I stopped by the offices of Cie Games to chat with Monetization Analyst Matt Winkler.

Developers of Car Town, currently ranked #12 among social games by monthly active users or MAUs, they’ve got hip offices featuring airplane fuselage, with Splunk dashboards projected on monitors above invoking images of a modern-day bridge of the Starship Enterprise.

Indeed Splunk does act as the bridge or command center for many of their operations.

“It’s important to us to know everything about the game,” said Winkler. “What our users are doing, what they’re buying, how they’re interacting with the game…Every decision we make is…

NOTE:   There is a new and updated post on this topic located here.

Over the past year, Splunk has increased it’s footprint for installations on Amazon EC2.  Along with this, come questions about best practices and recommendations for deploying in a cloud environment.   In this post, I’ll provide some guidance around deploying Splunk on EC2.  It is important to note that the search and indexing load will dictate the hardware requirement.  The following link contains the appropriate guidelines for sizing:   HERE

Let us first review our ‘reference’ server configuration for a deployment that indexes 10-100 GB per day:

• 8 cores (2 quad core, > 2.5 GHz)
• 8+ GB RAM
• RAID 1+0 Disk

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Greetings> Am so happy and proud to be the new CIO at Splunk. I knew this was the right company during the interview cycle between the point when we went thorough an awesome product demo, and a point near the close, when I was informed of the need to move kegs and surf boards from my new desk area.  Not only was this going to be a fun place, but it was also apparent that Splunk had adopted a cloud and open source based approach to sourcing IT solutions, which is very much in line with my philosophy.

In this space I plan to discuss the world according to me, as our CIO, and focus remarks towards the new realities…

In 2010, more than 68 customers shared their stories of success with more than 2600 Splunk initiates at 33 SplunkLive events in 13 countries. That’s a lot of IT folks using Splunk in a myriad of ways. From network troubleshooting at Visa, to recovering stolen laptops at large universities, to diagnosing flash crashes at a large financial organizations to providing deep intelligence and operational visibility at a large media provider–our customers are finding ever increasing ways to use Splunk.

I recently returned from ISACA’s Information Security and Risk Management Conference in Las Vegas and of the 36 sessions offered on security and compliance, seven were on the topic security and compliance for cloud services.  There were several key take-aways that I found interesting:

• Cloud computing is analogous to the 1800s when every factory had to generate it’s own electrical power for manufacturing.  Once electricity generation was moved to a utility (in the cloud), economies of scale drove generation costs out of the business and gave the business on-demand elasticity for electricity.
• Gartner is predicting that (due to the spread of cloud computing) 25% of companies will no longer have IT departments in 2012.
• Cloud security will be baked

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My fellow blogger and roustabout Savio Rodrigues has posted something interesting over at the Open Sources blog:

One of open source’s promises is to minimize vendor lock-in. However, it’s not so apparent that this value proposition holds when using software as a service (SaaS) or cloud-based platform services.

This is a great point and one we discussed at great length at last night’s Open Cloud Meetup here at Splunk HQ. One of the topics we covered was how open source seems less relevant in a cloud-y, saas-y world. Sure, everyone loves to participate in Open Source communities. While Splunk has never defined itself as an Open Source company or released…