Analyze, monitor and store your data with Splunk

Overview

In nowadays world machine data is being generated at any moment, everywhere. Digital sources, such as servers and networks, websites, applications and programs and many more, produce mountains of data in the form of log files, scripts, alerts, etc. Machine data is valuable because it contains a definitive record of all the activity and behavior of your customers, users, transactions, applications, servers, networks and mobile devices.

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Technical insight

Splunk is a software platform to search, analyze and visualize the machine-generated data mentioned above. The infographic below mentions some of the functionalities for which Splunk can be used.

Simply put, Splunk consists of three main components - an indexer, a search head, and a forwarder:

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Indexer

Processes incoming machine data and stores the results in indexes

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Search Head

Allows users to use the Splunk search language to search the indexed data

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Forwarder

Instances that consume data and forward it to the indexer for processing

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Now that we have a basic understanding of what Splunk is and its relevance in the Big Data industry, let's take a look at a couple of example case studies where Splunk could be taken a good use of.

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Use cases

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Small company case study

If you work for a small company in which relatively small amount of logs is being generated Splunk could be easily programmed to suit up your needs.

What you might be looking for is Splunk Light, which gives you the opportunity to scale up to 20GB of data indexing per day, to collect and index any type of data, and to provide you with an unlimited number of searches.

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Medium sized company case study

For an enterprise-grade environment Splunk Enterprise offers the functionality, scalability and security to meet the demands.

With pre-packaged apps for IT operations, security, business analytics, and Internet of Things, Splunk Enterprise delivers value across your organization.

Splunk Enterprise comes with an option of a cloud service or installable software. Hybrid environments are also supported.

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Benefits

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Splunk Light

- log search and analysis automation for small IT environments

- no more than five users interfacing the Splunk software

- administering the operations on a single server

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Splunk Enterprise

- unlimited maximum daily indexing

- unlimited number of users interfacing the Splunk software

- absolute scalability to meet your company demands

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