Splunk Operational Intelligence Cookbook

Josh Diakun · Paul R Johnson · Derek Mock

Oct 2014 · Packt Publishing Ltd

About this ebook

This book is intended for users of all levels who are looking to leverage the Splunk Enterprise platform as a valuable operational intelligence tool. The recipes provided in this book will appeal to individuals from all facets of a business – IT, Security, Product, Marketing, and many more!

Ratings and reviews

The book focuses on the health and efficiency monitoring of applications. It's very comprehensive as it covers many scenarios and common problems that can plague front end - customer facing environments. This book will assist in you extracting the gold within your data that you may not realize you have. You will be able to create dashboards for an entire application from end-to-end and give your clients an overall picture of what is happening through the many layers of an application. This book will cover transaction failure rate, database connection health, web logs, and how to work with all of these different types of data to paint the whole picture for the clients to view in a single place. It is a great next step after reading "Exploring Splunk" (be sure to read that book first) to start building your Splunk environment to cater to your companies needs around operational intelligence. It will help give you the ability to determine when and where your applications are failing, which is a huge win and this book will help most with reaching their goals around this use case. Hope to see more of these books around other use cases.

This 400+ page cookbook covers off just about every topic you'd expect from a great cookbook; from data ingestion, search/reporting/dashboarding, all the way through to optimisation and customisation options. I particularly like the "How it works..." sections, which explain what Splunk is doing behind the scenes and under the covers to make it all work. This can sometimes be a little difficult to work out using just the official Splunk documentation. I'm pretty sure everyone will find a few new gems from this cookbook, and it's going on my most useful list!

About the author

Josh Diakun is an IT operations and security specialist with a focus on creating data-driven operational processes. He has over 10 years of experience in managing and architecting enterprise grade IT environments. For the past 5 years, he was managing a Splunk deployment that saw Splunk used as the platform for security and operational intelligence. Most recently, Josh has partnered in setting up a business venture, Discovered Intelligence, which provides data intelligence solutions and services to the marketplace. He is also a cofounder of the Splunk Toronto User Group.; Paul R Johnson has over 10 years of data intelligence experience in the areas of information security, operations, and compliance. He is a partner at Discovered Intelligence—a company that specializes in data intelligence services and solutions. He previously worked for a Fortune 10 company, leading IT risk intelligence initiatives and managing a global Splunk deployment. Paul cofounded the Splunk Toronto User Group and lives and works in Toronto, Canada.; Derek Mock is a software developer and architect, specializing in unified communications and cloud technologies. Derek has over 15 years of experience in developing and operating large enterprise-grade deployments and SaaS applications. For the past 4 years, he has been leveraging Splunk as the core tool to deliver key operational intelligence. Derek is a cofounder of the Splunk Toronto User Group and lives and works in Toronto, Canada.