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Go Splunk Yourself

November 3, 2014
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What’s going on with your systems? Who’s trying to access that restricted share or server? Who’s printing too many files? Who in your organization is spending a lot of time watching videos of cats or running some application that’s a known vector for vulnerabilities?

You don’t know? You should consider Splunking yourself. Splunk is a great tool for indexing vast amounts of machine data into a meaningful summary,  dashboard or alerts. It allows you to make sense of raw data so you can focus your attention to the things that need attention. The people, processes and machines in your organization are generating a vast amount of data and the people responsible for that data are probably spending too much time trying to find what’s important.  Security, Compliance and Infrastructure teams can spend hours combing through all that data to find the right file or line in a large log file that will tell them exactly what, where or who is doing something wrong. Splunk can take all that data and make sense of it so that the amount of time spent looking at raw log files can reduced dramatically.

While Splunk is a great security and infrastructure tool, one of the more interesting uses of the product is as a development platform for front-office applications. The idea is that all processes and applications generate some form of output. Whether they are logs, alerts, notifications or anything written to structured or unstructured data. When you think about the fact that the front office users of an organization do some of the same tasks that Technology users do (receive information from sources, make sense of that information and take action), you can see that Splunk could be used for more than just an IT tool, but as a development platform for managing all data, regardless of the source.

Data analysis is data analysis. Whether it’s error logs from a server, logs from your proxy server, sales data about a new product, social media data about how your brand is perceived or financial data about an industry, it all results in the same activity. Ultimately, someone or something needs to process that data, make sense of it and take action.

To find out what you need to know – trying Splunking yourself!

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