Blogs: community

Time flashes past and as I get older, it suddenly dawns upon me that seriously; time and tide waits for no man. Just a week ago, the entire APAC partners met in Kota Kinabalu, which was really a superb place to hold our kickoff as well as to bring the families along. The idea was to maroon all the partners in an island, give them just a few drops of beer and force them to listen to our Big Data Strategy as well as our differentiators.

Guess what? It worked! I didn’t see any partners strolling along the beach (except myself but that is another story..) and all of them were extremely attentive and stayed throughout the…

One of the most exciting aspects of working at Splunk is seeing the innovative ways in which our customers are using Splunk – whether it is for application management, infrastructure management, security, web analytics or business analytics.

At this year’s .Conf 2011, Splunk’s annual user conference, Godfrey Sullivan, CEO of Splunk and Steve Sommer, CMO of Splunk took the opportunity to recognize some of our customers with the Splunk Community and the Splunk Revolution Awards.

Community Awards

Splunk Community awards recognized contributors who have been instrumental in helping us build a vibrant and active community.  Since their launch last year, Splunk Answers and Splunkbase have become hugely successful because of the contributions from our customers, developers,…

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…

If you are a regular visitor to our web site, then you are probably familiar with Splunk Answers, our community-driven question and answer site, which has been a runaway success. You may also be familiar with our app and add-on sharing gallery, Splunkbase. When Splunkbase re-launched last year, it was pared down from previous iterations, but we knew it was only a starting point and would evolve to meet the Splunk community’s needs – the question was how and when.

The success of Splunk Answers pointed the way forward – Splunkbase needed to be more dynamic, more responsive, and there needed to be a way to communicate and collaborate with those who participated on the site. We had great success…

I had the pleasure of hosting SplunkLive Dallas late last week, with some of the best customer presentations yet from MetroPCS, Pegasus and Louisiana State University. 95 people attended, and nearly everyone stayed on for the afternoon technical sessions to dive deep into Splunk hands on.

What was remarkable about this event, to an even greater degree than other recent SplunkLives, is the extent to which Splunk deployments have evolved from simple search and break/fix – you could easily see an emerging maturity model for operational intelligence at work.

Lamar Holtzclaw, our local senior sales engineer in the Dallas area, gave a great demo showing exactly how Splunk can be used to quickly find SLA violations amongst transactions spanning…

If you haven’t yet been introduced to Splunk Answers, you’d better go and see what all the fuss is about. We started Answers to provide a fast, efficient medium for users to ask questions and get answers, and it has been a raging success. It empowers our users to help each other out on common – and some not-so-common – obstacles to success.

The Splunk Answers juggernaut is racing past milestones. We launched Answers in early April to little fanfare. In June we reached the 1,000 question milestone. And in late July we reached the 2,000 question milestone. And on August 18, 2010, Splunk Answers surpassed 1,000 users. We had no idea when we started Answers…

This week, we’re live at Splunk User Conference 2010. An excellent event that featured sessions, keynotes, education, and general Splunkery. Interviews with Ledio Ago & Lamar Holtzclaw of Splunk, Matt Uebel of Netsmart, and David Hazekamp, primary developer for Splunk ESS with Glasshouse Technologies. Recorded live, with noise, and Jeff’s irreplaceable laugh. SplunkTalk 10 at User.Conf 10. What a perfect decimal.

Enjoy Listening

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Tim Jones of Agora Games posted a good summary of his experience with Splunk. Tim reveals what we’ve known for some time. Splunk is incredibly flexible and powerful but sometimes finding the Splunk documentation to do exactly what you want isn’t as easy as it should be.

We’ve struggled over the years to keeping our documentation both up to date and easy to use. Earlier this year we moved to a wiki based approach to Splunk documentation in hopes of keeping it more up to date and usable with inter-documentation links. Suffice to say we are still embryonic in our use of wiki technology as applied to documentation. We power our docs site with MediaWiki…

Last week Luke Kaines, The Master of Puppet, held a very well attended Puppet Camp here in SF. He drew a fantastic attendance from top notch companies – I was most impressed with the technical quality of the presentations and breakout sessions ( quality food too! ). These types of events can often be mundane or boring – this was not. Kudos to Luke for building a quality community.

I had the pleasure of meeting Luke some three years ago back at a BayLISA event where I saw him win over a tough audience with an early incarnation of Puppet. Its been fun watching him over the years deliver on that early promise and for continuing…