To survive living in Los Angeles, I think you eventually have to develop an immunity to the weird glitziness of its everyday life—the movie premieres and the red carpets and the fact that the guy standing in line at Whole Foods who looks like Russell Brand probably is Russell Brand. When I still lived there, occasionally I’d still experience that initial thrill of recognition, that “OMG, isn’t that —…???” “aha!” moment. But, for the most part, I’m pretty much blasé about celebrity sightings.

So when I arrived at the Intercontinental in Century City the night before our recent SplunkLive! LA event on June 28, I wasn’t terribly shocked to see a flock of paparazzi and floodlights everywhere. Splunk is kind…

If the White House’s recent Big Data Research and Development Initiative is any indication, big data is a big deal for government. However, collecting, analyzing and reacting to large amounts of machine-generated data can prove to be challenging for agencies

Yesterday we teamed up with Bob Gourley from CTO Vision to host a Twitter chat on how government can make sense of it all. From data analysis for operational intelligence to log management for cyber defense, we covered a number of ways agencies can make the most of their data. Here are a few key takeaways from the discussion

• Determine how to deal with the data explosion. One of the most significant barriers to harnessing big data

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All the buzz these days is about managing big data. Splunk has been helping organizations around the globe manage massive streams of machine data for years now. And it’s not just the size of the data, but the variety and velocity. But you don’t have to take our word for it. Join us for an upcoming SplunkLive event to learn from our customers why they’ve selected Splunk to manage massive streams of machine data, improve service levels, reduce IT operations costs, mitigate security risks, and drive new levels of operational intelligence across IT and the business.

April 24: SplunkLive Singapore: Featuring Carlson Wagonlit Travel, Nanyang Polytechnic, and Mobile Operating Systems

April 27: SplunkLive Hong Kong: Featuring Hutchison Global Communications, The…

We wrapped up our SplunkLive events for 2011 by migrating to warmer climates–namely, deep in the heart of Texas.

We even had a few customers from the Great White North join us on our migration path. Josh Diakun from Interac/ Acxsys and Derek Mock of Ceryx flew from Toronto to wow the Texans with all the different ways they’re using Splunk. And for some local flavor, Bob Jones from the City of Corpus Christi rounded out the agenda with tips and tricks to help fledgling Splunkers get started.

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First I must say, this. This is a trio of superstars in the Splunk community. They use Answers, attended .conf, post apps to Splunkbase, hold lunch and learns…

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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At two full house SplunkLive events in London and Amsterdam, it quickly became obvious that the Splunk fan following in Europe is turning into a serious sized storm. SplunkLive London opened to a full session of 200+ attendees at the Tower Hotel. After a lively Splunk introduction by CEO Godfrey Sullivan, came presentations from Betfair.com, Tesco.com and a consultant on behalf of a rather large London summertime sports event that involves grass courts.

Betfair.com, the world’s largest betting exchange runs thousands of bets per second and uses Splunk extensively across 5 different datacenters. Representing Betfair was Will Thames, the product delivery technical lead. Betfair started using Splunk to centralize their logging, and to make it easier for customer support to…

I had the opportunity to attend our SplunkLive event in Columbus the other day.  Before I even mention the event, let me go on record as saying that the Blue Ribbon Pot Roast at the Tip Top Kitchen is probably the best darn pot roast I’ve ever had.  Hopefully my mother doesn’t read this. Let’s talk SplunkLive.  For those of you who have never been to a SplunkLive, it’s an event we hold regularly in cities all over the world for Splunk customers, partners, and those interested in learning a bit more about what’s going on at Splunk to interact.  Having been in the tech industry for awhile, I’ve been to many vendor events where you get to hear…

Crossroads Foundation using Splunk for just about everything!

April 14 2011 marked the second SplunkLive in Hong Kong, also the home of our Asia Pacific & Japan headquarters, led by the avuncular Robert Lau.

The venue this time was the Sheraton hotel, Kowloon. The location offered an impressive perspective of the soaring Hong Kong skyline, set across Victoria Harbour and framed by the backdrop of mountains. What was also palpable was the ‘round the clock’ hum of commerce and humanity.

This energy extended into the SplunkLive event, which buzzed with over 100 attendees from industries that included telecoms, finance, gaming, government and a non-profit organization you’ll hear…

NTU gaining real-time visibility across all security relevant data

Aviva Splunking AS400 logs + Windows, Unix and Linux to meet compliance

Great China Telecoms company using Splunk to deliver Operational Intelligence for value added services

April 12 2011 marked the second SplunkLive in Singapore, with nearly double the number of attendees from just a year ago. The Splunk team in Asia has also doubled in size during the same time-frame, to better service customers and the appetite for Splunk.

Run jointly with our partner Systex, attendees got to see our latest product release in action – Splunk 4.2. They also got to hear about 2 in-depth customer case studies.…

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.