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…

Couple of weeks ago, we talked about the need to appropriately invest in people, when you invest in technology.  I wanted to continue the discussion and focus on the new area of “Big Data” – more specifically the analyst who works on big data – the “Data Scientist” and the data analyst.

I love the term “data scientist”.  It has finally made the data junkie’s job title more glamorous.  It has given both name and fame to the role.  Well everyone is talking about “big data”.  Many organizations think  hiring a data scientist is requirement for solving all “big data” problems and the only analyst required with a big data problem are data scientist. If you have invested in…

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 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…

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,…

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 was in town for SplunkLive Orange County this week, so I stopped by the offices of Cie Games to chat with Monetization Analyst Matt Winkler.

Developers of Car Town, currently ranked #12 among social games by monthly active users or MAUs, they’ve got hip offices featuring airplane fuselage, with Splunk dashboards projected on monitors above invoking images of a modern-day bridge of the Starship Enterprise.

Indeed Splunk does act as the bridge or command center for many of their operations.

“It’s important to us to know everything about the game,” said Winkler. “What our users are doing, what they’re buying, how they’re interacting with the game…Every decision we make is…

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.