Splunk: What does it do? Does the name Splunk mean something?

Hi! I am Azfar and I am glad you are visiting me today.

Honestly, we hear from people far and wide about “What does Splunk do?”, “Does the name Splunk mean something?” And of course, “How can I learn Splunk?”

So, let’s start with the first question.👇

What is Splunk?

Splunk is a software platform to search, analyze and visualize the machine-generated data gathered from the websites, applications, sensors, devices etc. which make up your IT infrastructure and business.

If you have a machine which is generating data continuously and you want to analyze the machine state in real time, then how will you do it? Can you do it with the help of Splunk? Yes! You can. The image below will help you relate to how Splunk collects data.

If you already think Splunk is an awesome tool, then hear me out when I say that this is just the tip of the iceberg. You can be rest assured that the remainder of this blog post will keep you glued to your seat if you have an intention to provide your business the best solution, be it for system monitoring or for data analysis.

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.

The infographic below mentions some of the functionalities for which Splunk can be used:

Uses of Splunks

To give you more clarity on how Splunk works, I am going to tell you how Bosch used Splunk for data analytics. They collected the healthcare data from the remotely located patients using IoT devices(sensors). Splunk would process this data and any abnormal activity would be reported to the doctor and patient via the patient interface. Splunk helped them achieve the following: 👇

• Reporting health conditions in real time.
• Delve deeper into the patient’s health record and analyze patterns..
• Alarms / Alerts to both the doctor and patient when the patient’s health degrades.

Brief history of Splunk:

And here’s some more of our story: Splunk was founded in the early 2000s by Eric Swan, Rob Das and Michael Baum. Inspired by cave spelunking, they sought a way to better see into all the siloed information caves typical of most organizations.

Seeing that “everything” makes data, the team sought a way to extract value from that. The technology centered around a powerful search engine that scanned and stored log files within system infrastructure. We’ve grown a lot since those early days:

Founded in 2003, Splunk is a global company — with over 7,500 employees, Splunkers have received over 1,020 patents to date and availability in 21 regions around the world.

Today, we know that building resilience is a team effort. That’s why, over the years, we have acquired a few companies and merged their technologies into our solutions, providing more teams a way to get everything they need in one place.

Why Pick Splunk Over Other Technologies?

Splunk is distinguished from similar systems by a variety of characteristics and benefits. To begin, it is a data platform that may be expanded. Splunk is a scalable and adaptable platform that covers a wide range of use cases. You may use its search and reporting, security, and observability capabilities, as well as the 2,400+ apps on Splunkbase, to create bespoke applications tailored to your needs.

Splunk’s flexibility is another significant advantage over competing systems. With our patented schema-on-read technology, Splunk allows you to ask questions about unstructured data and provide structure on the fly. Streaming analytics guarantees that analytics-driven insights are available in near real-time. Splunk ensures that you can properly discern signal from noise at scale by combining full-fidelity data coverage with ubiquitous AI.

Splunk is also well-known for its ability to improve data security. Splunk is data source agnostic, which means it may be used across an organization’s complete IT environment. Multi-cloud, hybrid, and edge landscapes are all possibilities. Splunk accurately ingests metrics, logs, and traces, giving you complete context visibility. Spend less time piecing together data and more time taking action with it.

What are the Benefits of Splunk?

Advantages

1. Scalable and Easy to Implement

Splunk is highly scalable as it can ingest large amounts of data and process it quickly. Splunk is easy to implement as it can be deployed quickly and easily.

2. Creates Analytical Reports With Interactive Charts, Graphs, and Tables

It allows for the easy exploration of data to find trends and patterns. Enables users to create custom dashboards to visualize their data.

3. Auto Finding User Information

It can help to identify user information quickly, and it can help to find useful information from different data sources.

4. Help in Saving Your Searches

It helps users to find and analyze the data they need. Searches can be customized and saved for future use and can be shared with other users.

Disadvantages of Splunk:

Disadvantages

1. Expensive for Very Large Data Volumes

Besides the amazing features of Splunk, it’s a little expensive for very large data volumes. If you’re not careful, you can easily spend more than you need on the product.

2. Difficult to Implement Optimizing Searches for Speed

If you don’t have a lot of experience with Splunk, it can be difficult to optimize searches for speed. This can be a big problem if you’re trying to troubleshoot an issue or track down a problem.

3. Less Reliability

While Splunk is generally a reliable tool, some instances have failed to work properly, resulting in lost data or inaccurate results.

4. High Competition From Competitors

While Splunk is a well-established and powerful platform, it faces challenges from newer, more nimble companies. These companies can quickly adapt to changing needs.

How Dominos Pizza used Splunk Integration? 🍕

Perhaps you know that Dominos Pizza is a fast-food e-commerce platform that has gained massive reputation and recognition all across the world. But you may be unfamiliar with how significant challenges pertaining to data they were facing.

By using extensive data, they wanted to better recognize and respond to the needs of their customers. Therefore here, Splunk came up as the better option that helped them in sorting out this matter.

Take a look at one of the most popular Splunk cases of Dominos, which depicts the circumstances that Dominos faced and Splunk solved.

There were a lot of factors that Dominos addressed and wanted to resolve soon, that include: 👇

• They had a vast customer base.
• They had an omni-channel presence for driving sales.
• They provided multiple systems for delivery: Order food in-store, order via telephone, via their website, and through cross-platform mobile applications.
• They had several touch points for customer service.
• They upgraded their mobile apps with a new tool to support ‘voice ordering’ and enable tracking of their orders.

The excess data generated gave rise to the following problems:

• Less visibility into how customers’ need/preference varies
• Manual searches being tedious and error-prone
• Unpreparedness and thus working in reactive mode to fix any problem

Dominos wanted to find out a resolution to these issues, and that’s why they considered to use the Splunk tool.

Dominos Pizza utilized Splunk Enterprises to improve its online activities by developing new degrees of user engagement and awareness. Also, Dominos didn’t delay in understanding how to use splunk.

This first investment with the introduction to Splunk soon encouraged Domino to extend its use all across its business and marketing that helped them both to generate more income. Similarly, from corner to corner of Dominos entire franchise and the corporate network, the online sales data collected from over 10,000 of its stores.

• Splunk is a continuous monitoring tool that offered Dominos marketing teams the ability to monitor both the effectiveness of advertising strategies and one-off promotions in real-time.
• For example, the team can now calculate the percentage of discounts. If one is more productive than the other, Dominos can now make the right improvements online easily.
• So you can understand how today we see Dominos as one of the most successful fast-food e-commerce industries because there is hardly any country where you do not see their stores and franchises.

How does Splunk Impact on Business Intelligence?🕴️

Splunk is a data mining tool that reads the machine-generated data from the data center, the cloud, IOT Devices, mobile apps, server, application. It turns unstructured, semi-structured, or rarely structured data into powerful operational intelligence to run IT better, to better secure and audit IT. This software enables enterprises to attain real-time visibility and actionable insights to IT and the business, which results in better growth opportunities for business transformation.

This intelligent “Data-to-everything” platform has been designed to drive maximum outcomes by reading unstructured, semi-structured, or rarely structured data from websites, applications, servers, databases, operating systems, sensors, devices, and so on. It enables a business to thrive in complex data-driven business age by Analyzing trends, correlating different data streams, and identifying various patterns, anomalies, and exceptions.

Splunk can collect and index virtually any machine data in its native format from wherever it’s generated, and slunk forwarder can forward the collected data to a central server or device in real-time. An enterprise can unlock the power of data and gain agility by rapid visualization and sharing insights in customer reports and dashboards.

With Splunk, businesses can leverage given below functionalities:👇

• Ingest: It can ingest a variety of data formats like JSON, XML, and unstructured machine data like web and application logs. The unstructured data can be modeled into a data structure as needed by the user.
• Index: Indexes the data from websites, applications, servers, databases, operating systems, sensors, devices for faster searching and querying on different conditions.
• Search: Create searches from the index which help in
  - Retrieving events from an index
  - Calculating metrics
  - Searching for specific conditions within a rolling time window
  - Identifying patterns in your data
  - Predicting future trends
• Report and Dashboard: Searches can be saved as a report, which can be used for creating a Dashboard in the form of a graph or chart for visualization. This is helpful to the IT, stakeholder, and business people to analyze the data
• Alert: It also allows sending alerts when search results meet some configured conditions. Alert can trigger an action like sending alert information to designated email addresses, posting alert information to an RSS feed, and running a custom script
• Data Modelling: The indexed data can be modeled into one or more data sets that are based on specialized domain knowledge. This leads to easier navigation by the end-users who analyze the business cases.
• Forwarding and Receiving (Indexer): In an organization, data can be generated from multiple servers or devices. And if the data need to be indexed from all the device or server, it should be forwarded to a central Splunk server that can index all the data from different sources.

Gain Competitive Advantage with Splunk:

Across your enterprise, drive the maximum data-driven outcomes out of your unstructured data volumes with a purpose-built software solution Splunk that plays a crucial role in scaling up business agility and ensure maximum business resilience by,

• 82% reduction in downtime.
• 70% lower risk in cybersecurity vulnerabilities.
• 50% fast turnaround time for new apps released.

Splunk empowers enterprises to innovate and transform with confidence by simply allowing them to investigate, monitor, analyze and act intelligently with a large volume of unstructured data, which further helps to simplify collaborative responses across the organization. So what are you waiting for? Take your first step towards an insight‑driven organization.

What is Splunk used for: The Machine Data Challenge?

Just Look at the below image to get an idea of how machine data looks.👇

Now imagine if you were a SysAdmin trying to figure out what went wrong in your system’s hardware and you stumble upon logs like the one’s in the above image, what would you possibly do? Would you be able to locate in which step your hardware failed you? There is a remote chance that you might be able to figure it out, but even that is only after spending hours in understanding what each word means. To tell you in a nutshell, machine data is:

• Complex to understand
• In an unstructured format
• Not suitable for making analysis / visualization

This is where a tool like Splunk comes in handy. You can feed the machine data to Splunk, which will do the dirty work(data processing) for you. Once it processes and extracts the relevant data, you will be able to easily locate where and what the problems were.

Splunk started off this way, but it became more prominent with the onset of Big Data. Since Splunk can store and process large amounts of data, data analysts like myself started feeding big data to Splunk for analysis.

I urge you to see this Splunk video tutorial that explains the basics of Splunk, how it works, working architecture and much more. Go ahead, enjoy the video and tell me what you think.

What is Splunk | Splunk Tutorial for Beginners👇

Hopefully this article gives you a little sense of all the things Splunk .. And, as the saying goes, happy Splunking! 👋

Keep learning & keep sharing..