Last week we continued our road show launching Splunk 4 through the Southwestern US in Phoenix, San Diego and Los Angeles.This was our second annual gathering of customers, partners and users and we had more than double the attendees at this year’s Splunk Live events. In the morning we held a three-hour hands on technical workshop. Attendees had the opportunity to install and configure Splunk 4 on their laptops or remote server and get one-on-one assistance from the Splunk team. Afternoon sessions and dinner focused on customer presentations. We’re very grateful to all the presenters who took time out of their busy days to share with everyone how Splunk is transforming their IT environments. I captured some notes from the week and thought I’d share them with you.

Early Warning

In Phoenix we had a packed house at the Sanctuary conference center on the side of Camel Back Mountain. At 109 degrees I decided against hiking up it in the early AM. Dave Bridgeman, Data Security Engineer at Early Warning kept things cool showing the audience how his company’s use of Splunk in their security operations center. Early Warning collaborates with major financial services companies to facilitate fraud detection through shared information and knowledge in cross-institution environments. The company has an interesting history having spun out of First Data and is now primarily owned by Bank of America, BB&T, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo.

Dave is a well rounded IT professional who started as a developer then moved into network and security management. He current leads the data security team for Early Warning. The environment he over sees includes a variety of platforms including AS400s, MP300s, AIX, Solaris, Linux and Windows. He uses a combination of Splunk forwarders and syslog forwarders to collect Java and Cobol application logs and FTP/SFTP networking logs.

The Early Warning Splunk installation is designed to track transactions and users from one bank to the next in cross-institution activities. Transaction ID tracing correlates events across applications and services and Splunk alerts the team when jobs fail so the operations and development teams can securely troubleshoot issues on the fly. And remote accessibility mean no more driving into the office to access locked down servers in the middle of the night. On the security side of things Splunk helps Dave’s team track and monitor known fraudsters and bad user names allowing them to stay vigilant when monitoring external attacks. They also use Splunk to deliver reports for customers, executive committee members and the Security Advisory Committee (with representatives from the founding banks).

Amkor

Henry Grant of Amkor a $2.1B provider of packaging/assembly and testing services for the semiconductor industry also presented an overview of how his Corporate Data Center team uses Splunk. Henry overseas operations for the company’s SAP, PLM, Supply Chain, Hyperion and Oracle systems. Amkor has a heterogeneous environment of Sun Solaris, IBM iSeries, Cisco ASA firewalls, packaged and custom web and J2EE applications and TACAS/Radius accounting and access control technologies. With manufacturing locations in China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and The Philippines and headquarters in Chandler, AZ, the Amkor team is challenged with log and event data overload. GBs of data a day generated at multiple points makes operational troubleshooting and security investigations extremely complex.

SOX Compliance

Proving SOX compliance has traditionally been handled by writing and maintaining scripts to collect and report on errors, access controls and log access activities. It was impossible to segregate duties given the lack of access control to the logs and events themselves. Splunk has taken the place of the awkward script writing and maintenance to collect iSeries, Unix and application events and logs and provide automated schedule reports. The team is now expanding the Splunk footprint to handle network and Oracle logs as well.

Application and System Monitoring

Like most enterprise IT shops, Amkor has figured out that traditional point monitoring tools aren’t enough as they have a hard time scaling to all the modern day technologies, require intrusive agents and only work for known events but don’t handle anomalies and unknowns. Too many issues end up being reported by end users themselves rather than the monitoring systems. With Splunk Henry’s team detects event anomalies in real time and has dramatically cut their response time by hours per incident.

Tools for the Help Desk

Sometimes it’s the simple things that can cut your response time, escalations and IT budget. The Amkor team noticed a lot of calls and emails regarding VPN set-up and access across the company. With Splunk level 1 help desk agents are now able to resolve most of the VPN issues without creating an escalation. Henry’s team built a VPN dashboard driven by a series of searches and reports that gives entry level help desk personnel the insight they need to troubleshoot problems right away.

Henry’s Splunk Tips

The best part of Henry’s overview were the tips for a successful Splunk implementation. I’ve included the list here in hopes that these may help you as well.

• Provide training that caters to each group’s need.
• Utilize the deployment Server.
• Develop a Common Information Model.
• Update and change as needed.
• Use Tagging to Normalize Data.
• Monitor Scheduled Compliance Reports by using the Audit Logs.
• Splunk into your processes where possible.
• Setup Test/Dev Environment and a Test/Dev Index .

Intuit Consumer Group

The Intuit team of Jeff Ludwig, Chief Architect and Larry Raab, Architect of the Consumer Group joined us to share how use Splunk in production support operations. Jeff leads the Consumer Group’s Connected Services Development for electronic and print tax and payroll filings for TurboTax, ProSeries, Lacerte and QuickBooks. Larry speciali a large-scale, highly available application and systems architect responsible for the consumer group applications and infrastructure.

While the original use for Splunk at Intuit was application management, Jeff and Larry covered three additional ways they have applied Splunk including reliable monitoring, improving user experience and large-scale reporting for compliance and business intelligence.

Recently, Johnvey Hwang wrote a post called Standing on Our Own Platform. He was the first one at Splunk to break the ice and use the “P” word. Now it’s out there. What do we see when we stand on our own platform? While only you and the future will tell us — there are a few things we hope to see on the horizon.

First, it’s our belief there’s a lot of money out there wasted on point products for managing networks, servers, applications … even security. A lot of these systems redundantly collect, transmit and store much of the same machine generated data. Think of the network, storage and administration resources duplicated on all this stuff. By providing a platform where the same IT data can be managed once, resources can be freed for other projects.

Second, none of these products work together. If you’re running a network manager to collect and look at SNMP and netflow data you know it doesn’t integrate with your log management system and of course neither talks to your SIEM, SOA, virtualization or application framework monitoring consoles. Building a dense index of data from all of these tools enables correlation across all your silos of instrumentation.

Third, and perhaps most important, isn’t it frustrating to spend so much time getting a new tool running only to discover, it doesn’t do what you need? Allowing, as Johnvey calls it the “intrepid” sysadmin or the creative developer to build on top of our IT Search engine means you can make Splunk do exactly what you want and share it with others if you so desire.

We’re not just jumping on the bandwagon here. Sure everyone seems to have a platform play. It feels like Web 3.0. Google has the mobile phone thing. Facebook, MySpace and Ning have social networking. Salesforce.com has AppExchange and force.com. For interesting reading on the phenomenon check out Marc Andreessen’s post from a few months ago on the topic.

Everyone here hopes to convince you that the thoughtfulness by which we’re going about this will yield much more than a bunch of hype. Ultimately the goal is to allow anyone to unleash their creativity to devise their own way to use Splunk.

Much more to come for sure. If you have thoughts or want to get involved — let us know anytime.