Spotlight on Splunk
Written for The New York Technology Council
Splunk is a member of the New York Technology Council. It fits right into the Digg Council’s ideal — a forward-looking company that uses technology to make significant change — in Splunk’s case, the way organizations manage and secure their IT infrastructures. It corrects the problems of existing silo technologies that are delivered as point solutions for managing each component that’s running in IT. Splunk provides a powerful software engine that allows users to point to data from hundreds or thousands of technologies then index it and provide it in one place for viewing, searching, and analysis.
Splunk was born from its founders’ frustrations running some of the world’s largest IT infrastructures. Using state-of-the-art IT management tools, they found it nearly impossible to locate the root cause of problems, investigate security attacks and assemble all the data required for compliance audits. Their conclusion was that the silo approach to managing IT with separate tools for every technology and IT function was complex, costly, and didn’t scale.
They founded Splunk to develop a new approach. The concept was simple. If Google can index and let users search billions of pages of Web content in seconds, why not do the same for the datacenter? Splunk is the result of thinking differently — indexing the data generated by any application, server or network device running across technical, functional, and geographic IT silos and letting users instantly search, alert and report on a massive scale.
The company grew over 125% in 2009, in part because of its functional free download. The free download and transparency have also spawned a community of passionate users. The Splunk community has free access to documentation, online support, Splunkbase, Splunk Answers, community-driven Q&A, interaction with the Splunk development team, and visibility into the future product roadmap.
Users are enthusiastic — comments from user-groups reveal how Splunk has changed the way they work and dramatically improved their ability to manage complex IT infrastructures.
