When I was in Las Vegas last month for our Users’ Conference, I randomly threw twenty dollars into a pirate-themed penny slot machine. It was late at night, I might have had an adult beverage or two, and I was feeling lucky. Actually, I was resigned to losing my $20 and going to bed. To my surprise, after just a few minutes of randomly hitting buttons and playing all 30 lines like a Vegas VIP, I hit some kind of jackpot and walked away with $40. Vegas, I own you!

No doubt about it—everyone loves to feel like a winner! So, on Tuesday night during the Search Party, we distinguished the winners of this year’s Splunk Revolution Awards. The Revolution…

Attending .conf for the first time this year, I was reminded of the lyrics from Elvis’s song Viva Las Vegas

” How I wish that there were more
Than the twenty-four hours in the day
Cause even if there were forty more
I wouldn’t sleep a minute away”

I didn’t want .conf12 to end. Hearing our customers talk about their usage of Splunk, meeting some of you face-to-face and learning all that’s going on in Splunk put me in a high trance – one that I’ve not quite experienced in Vegas before.

Speaking specifically about virtualization – we had multiple sessions – for VMware, for Citrix solutions such as XenDesktop, XenApp,

I was excited and honored to presented a session titled “Save the World with Splunk” at .conf 2012 on September 12, 2012 in Las Vegas, NV. Thanks to the rad Splunk Media Studio team, my talk is now available online for anyone that was unable to catch it the first time around. w00t!

Talk is 35m and here is a short synopsis:

You know Splunk can help you save the day, but did you know Splunk could potentially save the world? We think it’s possible–watch this session to discover how. First we’ll showcase what folks have already done–optimizing the supply chain for delivering aid after an earthquake or monitoring flood water levels to coordinate evacuations. We’ll look at…

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.…

Time flies.  Couple of weeks ago, I was visiting a major retailer to finish up my kid’s back to school shopping.  To my surprise, I found number of holiday items – Halloween, Christmas lights and other items on the shopping racks. Hmm….I just realized that retailers are getting ready for the holiday season.

This is the time when retailers look forward to increased activity in their stores and online.  As ecommerce is picking up, more buyers prefer to do research online and make purchases through websites or mobile apps.

Holiday season can be nerve wracking for website owners who count on site availability, better user experience to drive website conversion.  Many website drive a major portion of their yearly…

Are you virtualizing your environment? Is your organization soaking in all the buzz around Cloud? Are you virtualizing your infrastructure or adopting cloud solutions? Want to gain efficiencies and learn how Splunk can help? Come join us in our various Cloud and Virtualization sessions at .conf.

We have a solution for VMware  (but of course!). Come join us to learn about how to best configure the App, a demo and various use cases discussed over 3 sessions. Don’t miss out on the opportunity to speak directly to the experts who created this App. Learn why all our customers are excited about the solution that provides them unprecedented levels of granularity on their virtualization data with the ability to relate…

Are you going to be at .conf? If not, you should be. Don’t miss the opportunity to listen to Justin Hardeman from Availity, a leading health information network, where he discusses how his organization uses Splunk for proactive monitoring and business reporting. In this session, he illustrates how Splunk has helped his organization gain visibility, analytics and intelligence on their applications, infrastructure and business with proactive monitoring and rich analytics. Join Justin at his session “Think Beyond Application Monitoring”, speak to him (and the Splunk team if you want!) and learn about how he has been able to drive enterprise adoption of Splunk.

Where: The Cosmopolitan Hotel, Brera 2&3

Date: 09.12.2012

Time 2:45 pm – 3:45 pm

Splunk is providing two applications to integrate Splunk with Hadoop: Splunk Hadoop Connect and the Splunk App for HadoopOps.

These two integrations provide solutions for two major issues of Hadoop. One issue is that developing Hadoop applications is time consuming. As a result, most Hadoop-related projects take a long time to develop, and once developed, still require specialized knowledge to adapt to new requirements. Another issue is that monitoring a Hadoop stack across multiple servers can be extremely complex and time consuming. As a result, critical problems in Hadoop environments will often reoccur and remain unresolved.

Splunk Hadoop Connect, Splunk App for HadoopOps, and Shuttl (archives Splunk files to Hadoop) provide a complete integration to Hadoop.

Splunk Hadoop Connect

Splunk Hadoop…

A few weeks ago we announced the: “Where Will Your Karma Take You Awards Contest.” The contest is your chance to ratchet up your participation in Splunk’s online community so you can participate in Splunk’s ultimate community and educational event: .conf2012.

Current standings for each of the categories:

Most up voted question:

1. clyde772: Slow search when evaluating a numeric value.
2. Mahieu: Finding events that have never happened before
3. aniketb: updating a lookup table by external means

Most points accumulated from answering questions:

1. dwaddle (380)
2. ayn (250)
3. sideview (220)
4. mhibbin (90)
5. lowell (40)

Most downloaded app from Splunkbase Apps:

1. sideview: Sideview Utils (822)
2. josh 1: Splunk License Usage (119)
3. southeringtonp: Splunk for OSSEC – Splunk v4 version (118)

…

Your phone rings at 3am. A frantic Level 1 support staffer is panicking. The web storefront has gone down. You dig around and quickly find out that the ESB has crashed and the warm standby instance failed to kick in. The logs reveal that the JVM terminated because it ran out of heap memory. How could this have happened? We tested it, right?

The dreaded java.lang.OutOfMemoryError is by far the most commonly recurrent problem I’ve seen in JVM based applications throughout my career.

So let’s just go over a few things you failed to do.

• You failed to use “Splunk for JMX” to monitor your JVM heap and proactively alert you when a heap usage threshold was breached.
• You

…