What is Splunk?

You must be aware of the exponential growth in machine data over the last decade. It was partly because of the growing number of machines in the IT infrastructure and partly because of the increased use of IoT devices. This machine data has a lot of valuable information that can drive efficiency, productivity and visibility for the business. Splunk was founded for one purpose: To Make Sense Of Machine Generated Log Data.

The Splunk platform uses machine data—the digital exhaust created by the systems, technologies and infrastructure powering modern businesses—to address big data, IT operations, security and analytics use cases.

Machine data is valuable because it contains a definitive record of all the activity and behavior of your customers, users, transactions, applications, servers, networks and mobile devices. It includes configurations, data from APIs, message queues, change events, the output of diagnostic commands, call detail records and sensor data from industrial systems, and more.

The challenge with leveraging machine data is that it comes in a dizzying array of unpredictable formats, and traditional monitoring and analysis tools weren’t designed for the variety, velocity, volume or variability of this data. This is where Splunk comes in.

Splunk captures, indexes, and correlates real-time data in a searchable repository from which it can generate graphs, reports, alerts, dashboards, and visualizations. It is basically a horizontal technology used for application management, security and compliance, as well as business and Web analytics. The insights gained from machine data can support any number of use cases across an organization and can also be enriched with data from other sources. The enterprise machine data fabric shares and provides access to machine data across the organization to facilitate these insights. It’s what we call Operational Intelligence.

Real time processing is Splunk’s biggest benefit because it has seen storage devices get better and better over the years. The processors become more efficient with every ageing day, but not data movement.

The other benefits with implementing Splunk are:

• Your input data can be in any format for e.g. .csv, or json or other formats
• You can configure Splunk to give Alerts / Events notification at the onset of a machine state
• You can accurately predict the resources needed for scaling up the infrastructure
• You can create knowledge objects for Operational Intelligence

We could see the detail and benefits of Splunk in the subsequent blogs. Do write to us on info@anarsolutions.com for further details.
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