Without a doubt the past week has been the most amazing week in Splunk history. The crazy coast to coast multi-city launch left us all exhausted and electrified. A few of the things that stick in my mind…

First Splunk 3.2 including Splunk for Windows went live on our download page last Saturday and more than 40% of our downloads in the past week have been for our new Windows version. Then Nick Selby of 451 Group wrote an analyst brief on us. He said, “Splunk is awesome: it’s multiplatform, easy to install and easy to use. And with an abstraction layer of logs, configuration files and system messages, traps and alerts, it’s seriously useful.” 451 has a reputation for ripping vendors, so we’re flattered.

Dana Gardner, analyst with Interarbor wrote a very eloquent analysis of our platform launch on ZD Net. “Splunk has created the means to offer developers easy access to that data and the powerful inferences gleaned from comprehensive IT search. That means the data can go places no log file has gone before,” says Dana. Developers are certainly doing some way cool things with Splunk.

I’ve seen a couple of neat visualization applications including this one called Replay. It shows you a live or time lapsed view of your event streams. Here you can see the replay application hooked up to our internal wiki showing who’s doing what over a 24 hour period. Click on the image for the movie.

As for our own applications, the Splunk for PCI app drew tremendous interest at our series of Splunk Live events this past week. It’s just one example of how a business person with domain knowledge can package their own Splunk configuration as an application. If you haven’t seen Raffy’s video on the PCI Application, check it out here.

We also showed the Splunk for Change Management application as well. Seeing someone touch a file and watching the Splunk dashboard update instantaneously is an awesome display of how flexible Splunk has become. Check out the developer program for yourself and get your goods up on SplunkBase so we can all check em out.

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.