On a crisp and wet Wednesday morning, the W hotel played host to SplunkLive Atlanta 2010. 100 attendees packed the well-heeled conference room, all eager to learn more about Splunk, get burning questions answered and connect with peers. As with other SplunkLive events, we invited customer speakers to share their experiences with Splunk. On this occasion we had three speakers and every one of them was stellar.

Getting data into Splunk, then directing Splunk on how to best understand that data can be tricky and time consuming if you are not trained in the art of Splunk. These Tips and Tricks are meant to help the Do-It-Yourself Splunker. For the rest of us whose task lists are running amok with projects due yesterday, there’s professional help.

By the title of this entry, you may be thinking that there is some new capability within Splunk to index other types of data. That’s not the intention. From its roots, Splunk was used to index and search on IT data. It still is. However, because of the flexible nature of the software to index any type of time series text data, customers using Splunk do not restrict it to indexing only IT data.