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.

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.

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.