Blogs: splunk

On the second Tuesday of each month, Splunkers in the Dallas / Fort Worth Metroplex area have been getting together on a regular basis to talk about all things Splunk. Seems the users are able to take advantage of spending just a couple hours with each other, trading notes about Splunk, helping each other solve problems with our Splunk deployments and configurations, and sharing a beer and pizza too.

BTW, we are 40 members and counting now!

Our next meeting will be held at the Splunk Office in Plano, Texas on Tuesday, June 12th @ 6:00p CST.

Fellow Splunkers,

Thus begins my first blog post as an employee of a publicly traded company.  Given that, I would like to let you all know that [REDACTED - lstein].  Now that I have cleared the air, let’s move on.

It has never been more true: the more things change, the more they stay the same.  While Splunkers around the globe were partying like it was 1999, I was on the way to my second straight National Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition in San Antonio, Texas (aka the Alamo City).

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.

On the second Tuesday of each month, Splunkers in the Dallas / Fort Worth Metroplex area have been getting together on a regular basis to talk about all things Splunk. Seems the users are able to take advantage of spending just a couple hours with each other, trading notes about Splunk, helping each other solve problems with our Splunk deployments and configurations, and sharing a beer and pizza too.

There’s a famous 1899 misquote attributed to Charles H. Duell, who was the Commissioner of the U.S. Patent office at the time. He famously [didn’t] say upon resigning from his post, “Everything that can be invented, has been invented”.

I’d like to believe that he didn’t say it because he knew Splunk was out there, lurking in the depths of the as yet discovered world of machine data, searching for a better way for organizations to monitor, report and analyze real-time and historical machine data.

This morning we announced the grant of our second patent that covers organizing, indexing, searching and presenting time-series data.

If you have some time for some light reading, you can read the details of…

Psstt … Is geolocation ready in the latest release of the Splunk for Facebook app? Yes! To those who have been following the progress of this app and curious to know if the idea mentioned (geolocating activities in Facebook and visualizing them) in the previous post Splunk for Facebook – event updates with geolocation is implemented and how it is implemented, this is how it looks like.

Short story: Activities with geo-coordinates (latitude and longitude) will be marked on the map. Individual marker will pop up as the cursor is moved around the correlated individual result in the results section.

Long story: Quite technical but the steps will be described as terse and as simple as possible

[1] The…

One of the first and most beloved series of dashboards used at Splunk internally were created by R&D and product management teams, deriving a number of statistics from the downloads of Splunk software from our website.  The apache log provided the primary raw information for these dashboards, which were enriched and used to show download activity globally, by version, platform, and by country, and geo.  These have been the business analytics used to gain insight into the distribution of our products around the world.

Since taking on the new roll out of Splunk internally, the IT team has been working to set up a series of charts that focus more on operational metrics – the up time of the service,…

Hello again! What you see is a screenshot of a new feature in the Splunk for Facebook app. It is still a work in progress (many components need to be implemented – backend and frontend).

This a quick overview of the new feature added into the Splunk for Facebook app (“Activities updates in your social network”). It was mentioned briefly in the previous article “Splunk for Facebook … cont’d“ about getting better insight of the activities among your connections in your social network with Splunk. There are many parts that are pieced together to get this feature to work:

[1] Getting the data

This app utilizes the Facebook Graph API to retrieve the updates among your connections. In particular…

“The United States confronts a dangerous combination of known and unknown vulnerabilities in the cyber domain, strong and rapidly expanding adversary capabilities, and limited threat and vulnerability awareness.”^[1]

I recently listened to the final set of hearings on The Cyber Security Act of 2012. The bill was developed, “…in response to the ever-increasing number of cyber attacks on both private companies and the United States government.” The bill is really about critical infrastructure protection as may be managed, owned or operated by either the government or the private sector.  It’s a bi-partisan bill and combines efforts from past sessions from the Senate Committees on Commerce, Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, and Intelligence Committees. The bill would empower the Department…

To piggyback from the previous article, the purpose of this app is to help users make sense of the data retrieved from the Facebook Graph API. Despite the fact that we at Splunk love to sift through and look at huge amount of data, we still like to explore if we can cleanse them, in other words, massage, filter, extract important details, transform them in order to make them more meaningful and sensible.

Some interesting use cases that this app addresses:

[1] Correlating your connections

This app will ideally help the users, at a quick glance, understand how they are connected to other users within the Facebook ecosystem. We are talking about the interesting “n-th degree of separation” problem…