By Splunk October 30, 2009
“Serendipity is looking in a haystack for a needle and discovering a farmer’s daughter” – Julius Comroe
I just read the quote in a presentation from Matt Jones of BERG at the DXf conference. There is so much i love about this presentation i don’t know where to start. Just click through it ( embedded below ) and have your own reaction. It’s clearly designed to be a fun/light read. I think I clicked at about one slide per few seconds. Then went back and stopped on a few that really spoke to me. It was entertainment that made me think which then made me smile.
At its heart, splunk is a time machine. It allows someone to go back in time and “see” what their world looked like at any given moment and to look for trends, anomalies, volume, momentum, etc. If you put enough data into splunk, you can re-live the past with microscope, hit “play”, slow it down, speed it up, draw it on a chart, compare it to another time. We are all about time.
We recognized back when starting splunk that technology was beginning to record our lives. Everything logs, and these logs record footprints for most of what we do. Thanks to cell phones, personal computers, credit cards, traffic cameras, …. (insert long list), the world is slowly being recored by machines. The problem is that the volume is outrageous and their is no common format to “play” these recordings. In comes Splunk, your time machine.
Oh, this is the second cool link from the Berg guys this week. Also loved:
http://berglondon.com/blog/2009/10/23/toiling-in-the-data-mines-what-data-exploration-feels-like/