Josh Cowling's Blog Posts

Josh is a technologist, consultant, and entrepreneur based in London. Holding a PhD from Durham University's School of Engineering and Computing Sciences, he has wide experience spanning start-ups and enterprises in research, engineering, consulting, and pre-sales roles. While his background includes research, Josh is primarily focused on understanding, developing, and deploying new technologies that solve real problems and deliver tangible value. Connect with Josh on LinkedIn, especially if you have an interesting challenge in domains like cybersecurity, Splunk, data science, or machine learning.

RAG: Retrieval Augmented Generation, Explained
Learn
5 Minute Read

RAG: Retrieval Augmented Generation, Explained

Want to automate and optimize the outputs from your language models? Retrieval augmented generation is a fundamental technique. Learn about it here.
Text Vectorisation, Clustering and Similarity Analysis With Splunk: Exploring User Agent Strings at Scale
Tips & Tricks
5 Minute Read

Text Vectorisation, Clustering and Similarity Analysis With Splunk: Exploring User Agent Strings at Scale

How do you make use of URI path and user agent data to understand what you users are doing or to find malicious behavior? Find out in this blog.
Improvements to DSDL Container Build Process
Industries
2 Minute Read

Improvements to DSDL Container Build Process

We’re happy to announce that with the upcoming release of DSDL 5.1.1 we’re significantly overhauling the build process for containers in DSDL.
Visualising a Space of JA3 Signatures With Splunk
Security
2 Minute Read

Visualising a Space of JA3 Signatures With Splunk

One common misconception about machine learning methodologies is that they can completely remove the need for humans to understand the data they are working with. In reality, it can often place a greater burden on an analyst or engineer to ensure that their data meets the requirements, cleanliness and standardization assumed by the methodologies used. However, when the complexity of the data becomes significant, how is a human supposed to keep up? One methodology is to use ML to find ways to keep a human in the loop!
A Splunk Approach to Baselines, Statistics and Likelihoods on Big Data
Tips & Tricks
7 Minute Read

A Splunk Approach to Baselines, Statistics and Likelihoods on Big Data

This machine is sending lots of logs. Is this normal? This user has logged in at 1 am. Is this normal? We've seen a network communication with this particular signature. Is this normal? Splunker Josh Cowling explores the answers to these and other questions.
A Picture is Worth a Thousand Logs
Platform
3 Minute Read

A Picture is Worth a Thousand Logs

Splunk can be used to ingest machine-learning service information from services like AWS recognition, what does that look like and how can you set it up?