Splunk

Colin A. Bartlett — Sun, 20 May 2007 11:47:00 -0400

A talk yesterday entitled “Leveraging the IT Community” talked mostly about a service called Splunk. It’s an application that runs locally on your network and gobbles up log files into one big central management interface. You can search through log files with handle AJAXish web based interface and trace events as they move from one level of software to another. It’s pretty neat.

It’s available free for users processing less than 500 MB of log files a day (which doesn’t seem like very much).

The “community” part of this is essentially a Wiki/form/blog/social networking website that can hook into Splunk and allow you to post and view information about log file events that you encounter.

My reactions to this are summarized here:

First of all, the talk was pretty much a pitch for this product. I still thought it was interesting, but this wasn’t a sponsored talk and therefore should have presented other info besides just a pitch for Splunk.
The product seems like a neat idea, but what about Google? Why wouldn’t I just use Google to search for other people with the same problem?
Why limit this to just log files? Seems like that’s only one part of troubleshooting any IT problem. Places like ExpertS-exChange.com provide a way for people to find out about anything IT problem, not just log files. (shitty site, I know, example only)

"Splunk" by Michael Wilde

Tue, 22 May 2007 12:17:35 -0400

The SplunkBase community is exactly targeted at all IT problems, many of them stemming from logfiles, which are more cryptic and harder to understand. Google is a good tool to use to find problems, except if: (a) you're searching the entire web, and only if you're a good googler are you going to find your solution (b) the value of a growing open community has seemed to work quite well in the area of defining words and history---read Wikipedia. (c) unlike Experts-Exchange.. SplunkBase is free for all to read, comment, add and particpate in. A ton of times, i've googled, gotten an experts-exchange result and said.. "forget it.. i'm not paying for the answer.. us sysadmins and IT folks should just share the knowledge... hello SplunkBase".

has_many :thoughts: Splunk

Splunk

"Splunk" by Michael Wilde