By Splunk November 09, 2015
Up until now it has been possible to hitchhike around the universe “for less than 30 Altairian dollars a day” but you could never Splunk for anything close to that (even at today’s rather favorable Altairian dollar/US dollar exchange rate) and that has proved, for many in small IT environments, to be a challenge.
You really want to use Splunk to understand and optimize your IT operations but you work in a small IT environment. What do I mean by small? Well first you have like no money to spend on log management (let’s say less than $100 per month) not to mention you have a small staff (let’s say, uhm, you and, in your wildest dreams, four other people named Ford, Trillian, Zaphod and Marvin) that don’t have the time to manage a large and sophisticated Splunk Enterprise implementation. Heck you may not even have money for a server on which to run Splunk.
What is even more surprising is your small (and surprisingly financially and employee impoverished) IT environment may be smack in the middle of a large wealthy corporation or government organization (sorry did I imply “wealthy government organization”?) but for various reasons can’t partake of a larger centralized Splunk Enterprise installation.
Here’s just a few examples of small IT environments buried inside larger enterprises and unable to leverage a more sophisticated Splunk Enterprise installation or access a centralized one outside of their department (any of these sound familiar?):
- Secure “air-gapped” operations: For those of you not familiar with this the strategy of “air gapping”, according to Wikipedia, “is employed on one or more computers to ensure that a secure computer networkis physically isolated from unsecured networks, such as the public Internet or an unsecured local area network.” Think some really cool “black ops/Tom Clancy/John le Carre/Homeland” kind of stuff hidden in a small hardened and windowless room. The very nature of security keeps these environments small and self-contained.
- Branch locations: While you aren’t air-gapped for security reasons you are separate from the centralized corporate systems for organizational reasons (and, in the case of a franchise arrangement, may not always want to share your local data with the central office). So if you have a storefront that “delivers in 30 minutes or less” or deals in hot, addictive yet legal liquid stimulants and free Wi-Fi, chances are you are running a small local IT environment.
- Dev Ops Labs: You develop applications and you test them in labs before deploying them to production (duh!). For those labs you might want a separate version of Splunk to assist your dev ops lifecycle and to not mingle test data with production data (double DUH!).
- Fleets: Whether it be trucks, trains, ships/tankers, planes, or starships (is anyone else overly excited by the upcoming Star Wars movie? I’m so excited I just mixed my sci-fi metaphors) you have sophisticated systems on the move that, for reasons of cost or communication limits, are often removed from the network. Think about all of that data that could be Splunked from on-board systems (e.g. refrigeration container performance, driver/captain behavior, fuel efficiency) but can’t connect to a centralized Splunk implementation on a consistent basis?
If any of these situations cause a light bulb to go off in your head (or brings a small tear to your eye) be happy that there is hope and that is where Splunk Light comes into play. Splunk Light was designed just for you to bring the power of Splunk to the small IT environment. While you can do many of the cool things you can do in Splunk (aggregate and search your logs, set up reports, dashboards, alerts) you can do them with a simple out-of-the-box setup, streamlined user access management and in the cloud (with the Splunk Light cloud service or AMI options) if even dealing with a local server is too much. Oh and you can do them for less than $100 per month (well technically for $75 – $90 a month but that didn’t have that cool rounded “marketing ring” to it).
Find out more about how Splunk Light can bring the power of Splunk to your small IT operations for less than $100 per month (and maybe even for free). Oh! Don’t forget to bring a towel.
Marc Itzkowitz
Director of Product Marketing
Splunk Light
The $3 per day price is based on an annual license fee of US $900 for indexing up to 1 gigabyte of data per day using Splunk Light Software, and an annual subscription fee of US $1080 for indexing up to 1 gigabyte of data per day using Splunk Light Cloud Service.
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Thanks!
Marc Itzkowitz