Why Splunk?

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? Splunk helps you to do this, the image below explains the same.

Let us see what Splunk can do and why it has become so popular.

Real time processing is Splunk’s biggest selling point because, we have seen storage devices get better and better over the years, we have seen processors become more efficient with every ageing day, but not data movement. This technique has not improved and this is the bottleneck in most of the processes within organizations.

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

For those of you who don’t know what is a knowledge object, it is a user-defined entity using which you can enrich your existing data by extracting some valuable information. These Knowledge objects can be saved searches, event types, lockups, reports, alerts or many more which helps in setting up intelligence to your systems.

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

You can also read it in detail here: What Is Splunk? A Beginners Guide To Understanding Splunk from Splunk university .

The above blog post discusses how Splunk started off, and basic understanding of the Splunk tool with its benefits along with an example of how Bosch used Splunk for data analytics.