Erik Swan: The Splunk Platform
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Description:
Erik Swan, Splunk CTO and Co-founder discusses the world's first IT data platform.
Date: Feb 28, 2008 | Runtime: 02:35
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http://www.splunk.com/view/SP-CAAACUA
Transcript
Hi, I'm Erik. I'm the chief technology officer and co-founder here at Splunk. Our platform puts a single set of services on top of a mass of indexed data across your entire data center. It's not just logs. It's configuration data, historical server-trajectory data, power consumption, network traffic, database rights, IMAP messages, email. Anything you want can go in Splunk. As long as it has a time-stamp and looks like text, we're going to eat it. The idea behind Splunk as a platform is that a single Splunk instance indexes heterogeneous data from across the entire data center, and users take advantage of Splunk's built-in apps, DIY their own apps, or download apps from the Splunk community.
Splunk does to the mass and mess of IT data what RDBMSs did to structured data: a single platform, a single instance, and a clean API. Build just about anything you want on top of it, indexing all the data across your data center, providing secure, role-based access to any user, enabling shared knowledge across silos with a clean, easy-to-use interface and a clean, easy-to-develop-against SDK.
It's easy to download and install the free server, throw any kind of data at it, and go to down on your searches and reports. If there's something cool you want to do with your data that we don't do out of the box, it's easy to use our REST API or our SDKs to build whatever you want. Then you can upload that thing to Splunkbase, share it with people, and in the future even charge for your applications.
Our first goal is to make it easy to throw any kind of data into Splunk--not just logs, but anything across your entire data center. Our second goal is to make it easy to search, drill through, report on these changes without pre-setup schemas or configurations. Our latest goal, our third goal, is to make developing new applications on top of our server platform as easy as possible. And we're building an infrastructure to support a lively community and a viable marketplace to even potentially sell applications.
For example, an expert in fraud detection could package up and distribute an application comprised of saved searches, reports, dashboards, alerts. They could take this application and distribute it across their entire company, or post it on Splunkbase, for others, or even provide a value-add application and charge for it.
A developer in a financial-services company could build an awesome visualization and a real-time data integration with an external data source, using our REST APIs, our SDKs for .NET, for C, Python, or even Flash. Or, like many of our customers, someone at an appliance company could embed Splunk in their OEM environment for a scalable, efficient base storage layer, giving their end users secure access to all types of data, otherwise hard to expose.
We see the Splunk platform as being the back-end data source for all IT data and a huge number of cool and interesting applications coming from Splunk as well as within the community. Try it out, check out the developer section, and see what you think.