Splunk: Log File Search Engine
October 5, 2008
The name “Splunk” rang a bell for me. I checked my archive and learned that Splunk was Splunk Server, a utility that indexes logs from Apache, OSS X, sendmail, and routers, among other sources. The system runs on Mac OS X 10.4. You can download a copy here.
A reader in the UK sent me a link to a new search engine, also called Splunk. The article was written by Colin Barker and titled “Search Company Splunk Launches in UK” here. Mr. Barker reported that Splunk has about “750 paying customers.” That’s a hefty number of customers for a company with which I was unfamiliar. Mr. Barker wrote:
Splunk is a search company that offers “flexible input methods [to] index logs, configurations, traps and alerts, messages, scripts and code and performance data from… applications, servers and networks devices”, Haynes said. The company’s product is aimed at corporate users, and works by searching across the network and answering IT managers questions about who is using the network, what resources are available and so on. Haynes claimed it does this very quickly and inexpensively in comparison to standard systems-management tools.
I visited the Splunk Web site here, and my confusion went away. Splunk is “the IT search engine.” The company’s system makes it easy for information technology professionals and system administrators to “search an navigate IT data from applications, servers and network devices in real-time. Logs, configurations, messages, traps and alerts, scripts, code, metrics and more.” The company’s catch phrase is one I like: “If a machine can generate it, Splunk can eat it.”
The company has added some management horsepower, and it is focusing on a specific search niche. If you want to index and search log files and other system generated data, check out Splunk.
Stephen Arnold, October 5, 2008
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[…] didn’t quite translate all that well in the UK. Although Colin Barker and Steven Arnold didn’t seem to mind. Fast forward to October 2008 and here we are with more than 60 customers […]
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