Many of our customers use Splunk to analyze their Web traffic simply by indexing their apache or IIS server logs.  Those logs are useful, but in many cases they only provide half the picture.  This blog shows how you can send both server-side and client-side data to Splunk and have the best of both worlds.

What is server-side and client-side? Let’s say you’re reading this on blogs.splunk.com.  You’ve loaded this page and that action has been recorded in the apache server log, also known as server-side.  However, there are some interactions you can have with this page that won’t show up in the logs.  For example, you could “mouse over” the list of categories on the right nav or toggle…

Most analytics and data projects have started thinking of investing in big data initiatives.  With so much buzz about big data, organizations have started investing or are thinking of investing in Hadoop While it is great to stay on top of trends, it often ends up being another investment where the full benefit and potential is simply not realized. The learning curve is too steep and the time to implement too high. Current analytics resources lack the strong programming skills required to conduct even simple analysis tasks and activities using Hadoop. In this post, I would like to focus on providing a better understanding of what types of analysis are better suited for Hadoop vs. non-Hadoop technologies in order to simplify…

An election will be held on 25 March 2012 to select the Chief Executive of Hong Kong. There are three nominees, says, Albert Ho (何俊仁), Henry Tang (唐英年) and Leung Chun Ying (梁振英) to compete as the next Chief Executive of Hong Kong.

In the internet world, there is also a large amount of discussion in different social networks such as Facebook, Twitter or Weibo. We can use splunk to do some interesting analytics. 1) Calculating which nominee has the most tweet/retweet.  2) Analysis the daily distribution of all tweet within 24 hours. 3) Top 20 unique top tweets. 4) Top Re-tweeters  5) Top Topics

You can drill down to see any interesting Tweet by just clicking the…

It happens to me quite a bit that I hear a song and then it keeps playing in my head.  My 4 year old is notorious for singing the same song over and over and then I find myself humming during my long train ride to work.

Sometimes, it happens at work – you hear a thing and you keep hearing about the same thing in almost every conversation.  I am sure you have had those times too.  A number of you will have had days or weeks when you have had some discussion on “big data”.

For the last three weeks, I have had number of conversations on the topic of big data.  Strata,

On February 10, Forrester Research published research titled “Welcome to the Era of Digital Intelligence”.  Joe Stanhope and the crew at Forrester have done a fantastic job at laying out the current challenges in the web analytics space and laying out a framework for Digital Intelligence.  I couldn’t agree more.

Forrester is redefining web analytics as “Digital Intelligence”.  According to Forrester, Digital Intelligence is:

“The capture, management, and analysis of data to provide a holistic view of the digital customer experience that drives the measurement, optimization, and execution of marketing tactics and business strategies.”

What this means to the analytics industry is quite interesting.  Web Analytics solutions that have provided clickstream reports and some level of segmentation are…

We are always amazed by how passionate and innovative Splunk users are about using and extending the capabilities of Splunk.  I have observed number of examples where users are driving tremendous value in Web Analytics using Splunk.  I recently read a post from datalicious about their use of Splunk.  Datalicious is a Splunk partner that came up with an innovative way to augment their implementation of Google Analytics. Splunk is being used for a comprehensive look at the customer and drive advanced segmentation  and real-time analytics.

According to Datalicious “we realised that we could use its powerful, expressive search language and its intuitive charting & visualisation features to do analytics work that’s more difficult, more expensive, or simply not possible,…

By now, you may have already read the compelling story about web analytics and Splunk that seemed to make it to the ends of the earth last week. You can read it here and here. I’ll summarize the story for you: Splunking their web site gives a large media organization the ability to access, in nearly real-time, vital information about site visitors and listeners. If you thought Splunk was ‘just’ a security tool or ‘just’ a log manager, this story explodes that myth. This story is powerful because in one quick read it demonstrates the true power of Splunk. That is, if you’re in business, and your business depends in any part on IT functions, then…

In this video, first details are shown on how some of the dashboards for the SplunkTalk Podcast analytics are done. Insecure login, roles, users, security and a few tips on tweaking the dashboard are discussed.

Fullscreen the video. It will look much better as Splunk has a large web UI.

For those who might have a flash blocker installed preventing the player from loading in your browser (as the movie is right under this message), here is a link to the movie.