Maybe you noticed, maybe you didn’t but SplunkBase got a big face lift last week. We have a really amazing team of people who have been taking all your input and revitalizing our community IT knowledge base over the last several months. Our goal is to keep plugging away and innovate different ways to enable the sharing of IT knowledge and cool ways to use Splunk. We’re also now eating our own dog food. Splunk support is now using SplunkBase to support our own products and services.

So what’s new?

• Answers - a large and growing set of answers about Splunk, IT events and different types of technologies that generate a lot of IT data.
• How-To’s - more in-depth recipes for everything from configuring syslog-ng to how to understand Ruby On Rails logging
• Events - a library of contributed event types including punctuation patterns, tags, descriptions and more
• Add-Ons - the beginning of an architecture for sharing all kinds of Splunk goodies. You’ll find downloadable event types, searches, reports, custom data input scripts and configurations. My personal favorite is the OS Monitoring Add-on.

I say add-ons “architecture” because over time we’ll be extending the whole add-ons facility to make it really easy to create and share Splunk configurations and functionality.

I can’t thank enough the incredibly talented team driving SplunkBase forward including Patrick McGovern, Gareth Watts, Dee-Ann LeBlanc, Micah Delfino and Jef Bekes.

Stay tuned for even more SplunkBase goodness to come.

Last week Splunk sponsored ComputerWorld’s Infrastructure World conference along with HP and IBM. I needed to come up with a talk and I wanted to do something new.

I’ve been thinking about how to describe the challenges we have managing all this changing technology and innovation. Note this is seriously a work in progress. I’m developing a theory that there are three fundamental drivers to data center chaos.

• expectations,
• complexity and
• accountability

Any new business or consumer technology can be quickly met with significant expectations if it becomes successful. Our dependence on everything from wireless email, online travel reservation systems and hosted software as a service dramatically increases the expectations these technologies will always be available, fast and do everything we want. Examples of failed expectation are everywhere. A few examples. On June, 20th United Airlines canceled 24 flights and delayed another 286 flights due to a “computer gremlin.” Research in Motion recently experienced yet another 24 hour email outage and more than 2.5M users were without service in North America. Salesforce.com, pioneers of Software as a Service (SAAS), a more reliable alternative to running it yourself continue to have outages as well.

Rising expectations, success and dependency force increased complexity in both scope and scale to meet demand. Scope complexity abounds as more and more features and capabilities are added to the services we depend on. I used an example of Citigroup’s internal SOA architecture that has five federated ESBs — one of every technology flavor. Scale complexity occurs as infrastructures grow so large they begin to stress under their own weight. Salesforce.com for example is now processing more than 90M transactions a day through their web interface and AppExchange platform. At a meager 10 messages per transaction that’s almost a billion messages a day going through the infrastructure. Wow. Imagine finding a needle in that haystack.

Finally once popularity rises and the technology become established, accountability arrives. Now we have to worry how safe is the technology and in many cases monitor what people are doing with it. Everyone by now knows of the TJX situation where 45.7M credit and debit card numbers were stolen by hackers that somehow infiltrated its processing systems. The first card numbers were stolen three years ago and still there is no definitive explanation. Everything from cracked WEP keys, software tampered kiosks and insider job have been offered as possible causes. More recently TDAmeritrade and Monster.com have experienced similar breaches of user and account information totaling into the millions. And compliance is everywhere. SOX, PCI, ITIL, HIPAA, FFIEC, FISMA, ISO, CoBIT, COSO and other mandates means IT staff have reduced access and visibility into the systems their trying to manage and keep running.

expectations + complexity + accountability = chaos

I’m interested in your thoughts on the direction this is taking. I’ll be sure to blog more later as the ideas develop.

A few months ago I started working on a next round of funding for our company, Splunk. As an exercise I decided to keep notes on the progress of the fund raising in hopes of looking back and perhaps sharing a thing or two with other entrepreneurs. I’ve raised a lot of venture money (this is my sixth venture backed start-up) and learned to avoid many of the traps most first time entrepreneurs fall into. This time around I had a chance to apply several best practices I’ve seen over the years and invent a few new tricks that really helped things go smoothly. We closed a later stage round of financing on outstanding terms in just sixty days from first conversation to money in the bank.

Whether you’re raising a Series A round or a mezzanine round, you can sail through the process if you are prepared and you avoid the common pitfalls. My hope is to find enough time to tell the story of how we pulled this off and offer tips and insights along the way. Feel free to add your comments or contact me directly with your feedback and questions. I’ll try to post a bit every few days as time permits.

No doubt the current market for funding is a sellers market. The supply of capital for early and late stage companies is abundant. However, most entrepreneurs and management teams forget this simple fact. When you raise money you are selling equity in your company. You are inviting investors in to purchase part of what you have built and what you’ll continue building long after they invest. Why is this important? Its an important distinction. Compare selling equity in your company to selling a home. When you’re selling a house you feel very invested in the decision of who you sell to and what price and terms you get when you sell. You remember all those weekends you spent remodeling the kitchen or painting the master bedroom. And when you open your house up for potential buyers to tour, you’re letting them into the most private parts of your life.

Tip #1: When you raise money you are selling equity in your company. Its a privilege not a right for investors to take a look and consider partnering up with you.

Selling equity in your company is no different. You’re inviting potential investors in to learn all the ins and outs of your strategy, execution and plans. But remember, you’re inviting them. Its a privilege not a right for investors to take a look and consider partnering up with you. I make this point first because most entrepreneurs and management teams forget this very fact. Drive this point home with your team and everyone will feel much more invested in the fund raising process. You’ll all be much more discerning about who you invite to your open house and how you conduct the conversations.