Splunk and Operational Machine Data

Been a while since I looked at the Splunk language and environment.   Used it in the enterprise for analyzing a stream of rapidly changing sensor measurements and adapting them for analysis.   Admit I rarely see it mentioned in use. The document offered below would seem to be a good reintroduction.

" .... Machine data is one of the most underused and undervalued assets of any organization. It comes in a dizzying array of unpredictable formats and contains powerful business and operational insights that can help your team quickly diagnose service problems, detect advanced security threats and uncover the fingerprints of fraud.

Download The Essential Guide to Machine Data e-Book for a high level overview of machine data and the value it can provide across your organization in IT, security, business analytics and Internet of Things use cases.

READ E-BOOK

In this e-book you'll learn about:
Where you should look for machine data and what it can tell you
The use cases supported by each data source
Best practices to help your team get the most value out of your machine data

Best Regards,
Team Splunk

Splunk and the Data Problem

Had several interactions with Splunk, in the enterprise,liked it for streaming data problems.  But I would rather say that every problem has an embedded data problem, and that size of that can vary according to the business context. Don't remember Splunk being particularly aimed or useful at that, but seems that are building towards that.  Will take a look.

Every problem’s a data problem, says Splunk. Can its new platform fix them?  By R. Danes in Siliconangle

Splunk Inc. is getting serious about this data platform thing. The company wants to get friendly with data from any source — not just the Splunk index. The idea is that a large, inclusive platform can ultimately get more juice from data — business insights, social impact, etc. — than a hodgepodge of software products.

“We believe, at the heart of every problem, is a data problem,” said Susan St. Ledger (pictured), president of worldwide field operations at Splunk. Think that’s an overstatement? St. Ledger named wildfires, the opioid crises, and human trafficking as examples of the issues people are attacking with data today.  ..." ... '

Streaming Applications

Streaming applications, the only system I have worked with that does this is Splunk.  Also well known is Flink.   Usually large scale. Many other approaches exist.  Streaming is a means of processing arriving requests as they arrive.  Very successful in systems like Netflix.

Patterns of Streaming Applications  in InfoQ
Monal Daxini presents a blueprint for streaming data architectures and a review of desirable features of a streaming engine. He also talks about streaming application patterns and anti-patterns, and use cases and concrete examples using Apache Flink.

Bio
Monal Daxini is the Tech Lead for Stream Processing platform for business insights at Netflix. He helped build the petabyte scale Keystone pipeline running on the Flink powered platform. He introduced Flink to Netflix, and also helped define the vision for this platform. He has over 17 years of experience building scalable distributed systems.  .... " 

Splunk Used by Carnival Cruise

Been a while since I have looked at Splunk.  But here now, emphasizing data democratization:

Carnival gets data into all hands on deck with Splunk  By R. Danes in Siliconangle

If there’s one nugget among the heap of big data tools, tricks, and marketing fluff that businesses can actually use, it could be data democratization. This takes big data from a backroom concept to something business people can polish their product with day-in-day-out..... "

New Enterprise Splunk

Splunk, A package that I used for an application some time ago, for datastream analysis, but is relatively little known, reports their enterprise version 6.4.   Adds new visualization capabilities.

Accenture Leverages Splunk

Good example of how and why a major consultancy Accenture leverages Splunk.   Once again operational and real time problems and analytical results are emphasized.   Video.

Splunk Conference

Reports from the ongoing Splunk conference, describe experiences by business and its use for analytics and data visualization.  I was introduced to it a few years ago and impressed with how it could be used at a number of different levels, from interactive data exploration, to system development.  I like their emphasis on operational intelligence, bringing the results back to real business decisions:

Splunk writes:  " ... We see data—everywhere. Splunk® offers the leading platform for Operational Intelligence. It enables the curious to look closely at what others ignore—machine data—and find what others never see: insights that can help make your company more productive, profitable, competitive and secure. What can you do with Splunk? ... 

Pizza Business Insights

In GigaOM:  Case study of the use of Splunk for mining business insight by Dominos.  Intrigued by the use of this new capability, especially for time domain, real time examples in marketing.  " ....  Domino’s can make more precise marketing decisions—for example, the company can determine where and when it may be more lucrative to run promotional campaigns and analyze the success of these campaigns as well as one-off promotions in real time.  ... " 

Coca-Cola Gathers Streams of Big Data

Another example of the broadening use of Splunk for analyzing data streams.

Coca-Cola gets inspiration for IT automation from its bottling plants
Able to tell what people are buying from vending machines and when

Coca-Cola, the multi billion pound drinks company, today revealed that its automated bottling plants are inspiring its IT operations, particularly in the area of data collection. 

Michael Connor, the multinational corporation's senior platform architect and the man behind the claim, said Coca-Cola is collecting unprecedented levels data as a result of automation processes that have been enabled through Splunk’s data management and analytics platform, in conjunction with the Amazon Web Services cloud platform. .... "

InfraRed FUSION

I see that colleagues Elena and Ed Fullman are featured in the local paper.  Best of luck to them.

" ... Each week Cintrifuse and Cincinnati.com turn the spotlight on a hometown startup - highlighting the activity and stories around companies getting their start in the Cincinnati entrepreneurial ecosystem.

... InfraRed's FUSION analytics product helps marketers and IT organizations make sense of complex data generated by partners, third parties, and within their enterprise (e.g. back-office systems, retail locations, call centers, logistics, online and e-commerce, etc.). ... 

FUSION enables business users to understand the relationship and the performance of their strategies for advertising and marketing, customer service, distribution and inventory, retail and ecommerce, and even product design and pricing ... " 

Complex Regulatory Environments

Have been examining Splunk (SPL) as it has been applied to a number of dynamic data problems. Impressed by it capabilities.  Both for its search engine-like examination of data, and for creating processes for data mining.  Here for a complex regulatory problem at Barclays.   Worth a look and examination. Free for full examination at scale.  Several of my larger clients are using it.

Taking a Deeper Dive in Splunk

Mentioned to me some time ago, as an interesting solution, now taking a deeper dive. See Splunk.com  ... Will follow with some impressions.  See the elevator control analytics example previously mentioned.

" .... Splunk is an American multinational corporation headquartered in San Francisco, California, which produces software for searching, monitoring, and analyzing machine-generated big data, via a web-style interface.  Splunk  captures, indexes and correlates real-time data in a searchable repository from which it can generate graphs, reports, alerts, dashboards and visualizations. ... " 

Update:
http://www.splunk.com/view/SP-CAAAG2R    Using Splunk
http://www.splunk.com/view/SP-CAAAG2Q    Why Splunk?
http://www.splunk.com/get          Get Splunk
http://www.splunk.com/videos      Splunk Videos

When Elevators Phone Home

In GigaOM:   This has been described before as the internet of things.  But what are the most interesting that this network can do, beyond the obvious?   Networking intelligent, analytic things will likely be the next revolution.  " .... Your next elevator pitch might actually come from data derived from your elevator. That’s the case for an unnamed elevator manufacturing company that used Splunk’s machine data logging software to track how often its elevators were taking trips in its clients’ buildings. It noticed that the fewer trips people made, the more likely it was that the client would cancel the lucrative maintenance contracts the firm offered.

So it took that data and tweaked its approach. Now when it sees a slowdown it reaches out to the client to try a new plan or just make sure the clients don’t cancel. In the future it may offer new pricing plans to adjust for slack usage. ... "