What is Splunk?
Introduction
Splunk is a powerful platform for analyzing machine data, data that machines emit in great volumes but which is seldom used effectively. The fastest way to understand the power and versatility of Splunk is to consider two scenarios: one in the data center and one in the marketing department. Splunk produces software for searching, monitoring, and analyzing machine-generated big data, via a web-style interface.
Watch this Splunk Tutorial video
Splunk gathered all of the relevant information into a central index that you could rapidly search. Splunk can provide a detailed window into what is happening in your machine data. Splunk can also reveal historical trends, correlate multiple sources of information, and help in thousands of other ways.
Splunk does something that no other product can: efficiently capture and analyze massive amounts of unstructured, time-series textual machine data.
Splunk works into three phases–
- First, identify the data that can answer your question.
- Second, transform the data into the results that can answer your question.
- Third, display the answer in a report, interactive chart, or graph to make it intelligible to a wide range of audiences.
How Splunk Mastered Machine Data in the Datacenter
- Splunk begins with indexing, which means gathering all the data from diverse locations and combining it into centralized indexes. Before Splunk, system administrators would have had to log in to many different machines to gain access to all the data using far less powerful tools.
- Using the indexes, Splunk can quickly search the logs from all servers and hone in on when the problem occurred. With its speed, scale, and usability, Splunk makes determining when a problem occurred that much faster.
- Splunk can then drill down into the period when the problem first occurred to determine its root cause. Alerts can then be created to head the issue off in the future.
Operational Intelligence
Operational intelligence is not an outgrowth of business intelligence (BI), but a new approach based on sources of information not typically within the purview of BI solutions. Operational data is not only incredibly valuable for improving IT operations, but also for yielding insights into other parts of the business. Operational intelligence enables organizations to:-
- Use machine data to gain a deeper understanding of their customers.
- Reveal important patterns and analytics derived from correlating events from many sources.
- Reduce the time between an important event and its detection
- Leverage live feeds and historical data to make sense of what is happening now, to find trends and anomalies, and to make more informed decisions based on that information.
- Deploy a solution quickly and deliver the flexibility needed by organizations today and in the future—that is, the ability to provide ad hoc reports, answer questions, and add new data sources.