Can Your Organization Benefit from Splunk?
We’ve recently worked with some customers who needed a way to search for information from various logs across their IT environment. It is a difficult thing to do but we were able to accomplish it by using a tool called Splunk. In our ongoing effort to let you know about different ways to monitor your IT infrastructure, we thought we’d talk a little bit about Splunk this month.
What is Splunk?
Splunk can be looked at as “IT search”: Just as Google is used to search for things on the internet, Splunk can be used to search for things within your IT environment. Splunk is a software tool that allows you to search and analyze your IT infrastructure. You can search across logs, configuration files, message queues, JMX notifications, SNMP, and database transactions from any system, application, or device – globally, across all of your systems, in real time, in any “mix and match” combination that you choose. You can also consolidate these searches into a single repository to make it easier to use the information for troubleshooting or alerting.
The Benefits of Splunk
There are numerous everyday applications for Splunk, including:
- Creating Searches - You can set up regular, automated searches to alert you when specific things take place, or you can quickly run ad hoc searches as the need arises. And you can see everything that’s going on in your environment from one screen.
- Providing Alerts – Any search can be saved and scheduled for continual monitoring, with email or RSS alerts set up based on a variety of threshold and trend-based conditions.
- Being Proactive – Use alerts to let you know when issues may arise before your users even know there may be an issue.
- Managing Change – Splunk collects all of the configuration files for your server, stores them, and then allows you to include configuration changes in log file analysis and/or restore from these history files.
- Demonstrating Compliance – If you need to produce audit reports to prove compliance with SOX requirements, payment card agreements, or service level agreements, Splunk can easily do this for you.
- Displaying Data – Splunk allows you to instantly create ad hoc graphs (pie charts, histograms, line graphs, time charts, etc.) or reports in real time, from any data.
- Diagnosing Problems – The ability to search across logs files, configuration changes, etc. in one place lets you quickly get to the cause of issues affecting your infrastructure.
- Obtaining A Global View – Splunk allows you to see information across all of your servers, applications, and devices from a single place, making it easier to manage your infrastructure.
Click here to see some demos of Splunk at work.
How Coyote Creek Can Help
If you are looking at ways to either begin monitoring your environment or enhance your current monitoring capabilities, please give us a call. We have the expertise to help you accomplish your goals in a variety of different ways.
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