Does anyone else remember the ‘choose your own adventure books’ from the 90s? I do, and this year’s #splunkconf16 has me almost as excited as getting a brand spankin’ new pile of books. Just kidding, 2016 user conference is going to be much, much better!

(No, this is not an ITSI Glass Table)

Splunk .conf2016 is coming up fast, and everyone on the Splunk team is excited to head down to the happiest place on earth for this year’s user conference. Check out some key details below about the great sessions that will be featured in the Splunk IT Operations track this year at .conf 2016. This year, we’ve made it easy for you by parsing the sessions into …

Today Splunk announced the results of a Public Sector IT research project, The Big Data Campaign Trail – Every Data Point Matters for Better IT Operations.

Having been in IT Operations for a couple of decades now, I found the insights very interesting because I believe agencies and educational institutions are going through a fundamental digital transformation which is bringing them to a crossroads.   As an architect who works with our public sector customers’ daily I want to share my thoughts on the results over a series of three blogs.  This first one will highlight the major findings, while the following two will offer some insights based on my experiences that I hope you find helpful and actionable.

The …

Do you remember this piece of raw data:

I hope so, it was on the blog only last week … 😉

Today, let’s focus on the value we can extract and how we’ll be able to address some of the IT challenges related to the company strategy.

IT Ops

What kind of information would be relevant for the application manager?

I am sure he would be interested by:

• Number of transactions during the last X minutes and the trend
• Number of transactions in errors during the last X minutes and if this number is growing compared to the last Y minutes
• How long a transaction takes to complete for each customer
• A geographic distribution of the transactions

“What? You said …

It’s widely recognized that adopting DevOps principles can lead to many business benefits, including more agile and higher quality releases, and better alignment with customer needs. Unfortunately, one of the biggest challenges in DevOps adoption is the cultural divide between teams.

Also, container technology is gaining the attention of many in the dev community, due to the acceleration of continuous deployment and automation, and this doesn’t make the life of operations teams that much easier. I recently attended Container World Santa Clara, and the consensus is that in the next 5-10 years, containers will still be running in parallel or on top of virtualized infrastructures. So, the current or old systems are not retiring at the same pace as …

As a network geek, I’ve always wanted to leverage sniffers and deep packet inspection programs to understand user experience and to secure networks. I have a home lab with many virtual machines. But let’s be honest, I really want to know what my household is doing on the Internet! I needed something light-weight, NOT an appliance as large as a data center!

Network Sniffers aren’t anything new. In fact, they’re old school. But, who would have thought a Raspberry Pi would be powerful enough to act as a real-time 24×7 sniffer? I embarked on this journey recently with the Splunk Stream App. And I must say, I’m pretty impressed.

Splunk Stream captures real-time streaming wire data and performs packet analysis …

As I write this, I’m on a train into London and back in a cold, foggy, slightly chilly UK following September’s .conf2015 in Las Vegas. It was a pretty bumper week with around 4000 people in the MGM Grand hearing hundreds of fantastic customer stories, new product announcements, a huge partner pavilion and some great Splunk stories being shared over a drink (or two…). This year’s event generated some great buzz with #SplunkConf trending on Twitter during the keynote. From an EMEA perspective, we had three customer testimonials in the opening hour from BMW (using Splunk for IoT), Otto Group (using Splunk for business analytics) and Vodafone (using Splunk’s new IT Service Intelligence product). We also had customer speaking sessions from …

Planning my agenda for the .conf2015 next week is really exciting this year. I am sure you feel the same – like a
kid in a candy store! If you are interested in learning about all the benefits Splunk App for Stream can bring you such as better applications visibility or improved security, then mark your calendars for the three sessions you don’t want to miss.

1. The Splunk team will present “Splunk App for Stream Deployments in the Real World: Enhance Operational Intelligence Across Application Delivery, IT Ops, Security and More” on Wednesday, September 23, 2:15 PM. Here is a sneak peek into our session. First, we will go over how Stream can help you quickly achieve real-time applications intelligence and cloud visibility

We just improved our popular and free Splunk App for Stream! In the new Splunk App for Stream 6.3 release we’ve introduced Distributed Forwarder Management (DFM), a functionality that simplifies configuration while increasing administration flexibility. The new 6.3 release is available now on Splunkbase.

As a flexible software solution, you can deploy the Splunk App for Stream anywhere in the network—on-prem or cloud environments. Your implementation can be simple—collecting data from only a handful of SPAN ports, or very complex—with hundreds of different globally distributed Stream forwarders gathering data from endpoints. If your monitoring needs are more complex, you can target and customize how and where to deploy Stream to collect wire data to meet those needs more precisely.…

I’m not giving you any solutions today (boo!), just some clarifications based on how I see the world of data as it pertains to Splunking storage. Been thinking about this topic a lot over the past year or so, and it’s a shame that I’ve not bothered to write any of it down here before. Fixing that starting now! (This is not to be confused with the topic of storage of Splunk data–also a topic I think a lot about! That’s another series of blog posts.)

First a quick definition of storage. I’m talking about the storage subsystem in a computer system. This can be local storage DAS (Direct Attached Storage), or it could be SAN (Storage Area Netowrk) or NAS …

With Knowledge14 kicking off next week, it’s a good time to reminisce on your service desk, the face of your operations to both internal and external customers.

For external facing service desks supporting customers, the effectiveness has traditionally been measured on mean time to resolution, first level resolution rates, escalations and such. And for internal facing service desks that support employees, its effectiveness has been measured mostly around service delivery within acceptable internal SLOs/SLAs.

These days, service desks are expected to continuously improve end-user satisfaction by delivering high quality, timely customer/user support. How do you enable this?

Let’s look at each of the delivery models individually.

External Facing Service Desks:

The most important metrics to track the external service desk …