All You Need To Know About Splunk

Big data reached a value of approximately $27 billion in 2015 and is expected to be a $100 billion market by 2020. (Survey by Snowflake Computing, 2015). The same survey report states that only 5% of enterprises have fully deployed big data strategies. The opportunity is immense and the nascent untapped potential of Big Data makes ‘Splunk’, an empowering tool for businesses around the world.

What is Splunk?

“Splunk is the ‘Google search engine’ for machine data.”  That’s how Erik Swan, Splunk’s CTO and co-founder of Splunk, described it in an interview.

In simple terms, Splunk can make machine data work better, smoother, faster and cheaper, whether it’s the company’s own IT infrastructure or a Cloud service. Behind the structure of what you see on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Amazon, LinkedIn, or any other web site for that matter, the crux of information resides in a hidden universe of unstructured data. Splunk enables businesses to collect, organizes and analyze this very unstructured machine data and represents a clean business-to-business play on the emerging Internet-of-Things space.

Splunk offers logical, intuitive and human-centric analytics for operational intelligence. Most importantly, it is a seamless analytics, monitoring and data visualization tool that helps you improve business capabilities by making intuitive sense out of vast quantities of unstructured data. While doing this, Splunk permits simple Google-like queries and answers about how any IT system is operating. The field of unstructured and meta-data analytics is the next phenomenon in what computing enables and Splunk is a promising leader in this burgeoning domain.

The Phenomenal Growth of Splunk

1. More than 9,000 enterprises, government agencies, universities, and service providers in more than 100 countries use Splunk software to deepen business and customer understanding, mitigate cyber security risk, prevent fraud, improve service performance, and reduce costs.(source: tcs.com)
2. Splunk has captured a whopping 10% of the Big Data Analytics market within just eight years of its launch. (Source: Forbes)
3. Vodafone uses Splunk to make sure its routers and system behaves, and to watch for and deal with virus attacks that can be notoriously sneaky and hard to find with traditional monitoring.
4. Splunk has 537 apps to make sense of almost every format of log data, from security to business analytics to infrastructure monitoring.

Features

1. Log processing is one of the core competencies of Splunk. It stores all your logs and provides very fast search capabilities roughly in the same way Google does for the internet device log files.
2. The Search Processing Language (SPL) for Splunk is an extremely powerful tool for extracting meaning out of vast amounts of data and performing statistical operations on what is relevant in a specific context.
3. Splunk indexes any kind of machine data that can be represented as text and there is no need to define tables and fields before you can store data. Splunk does not have a fixed schema. In fact, it performs field extraction at search time. This aspect allows for great flexibility.
4. It does not reduce the granularity of older events, compressing many data points into one because of capacity limits. It can seamlessly index hundreds of terabytes per day and keep practically unlimited amounts of data.
5. Splunk dashboards allow you to monitor all of your systems at once, so when a problem occurs you can start looking for a solution even before the problem starts bothering the system, or even better, its dashboard allows to clearly look for signs of a possibly arising problem.

Careers

The top five industries hiring Big Data related expertise include Professional, Scientific and Technical Services, Information Technologies, Manufacturing, Finance and Insurance and Retail Trade. Within Big Data related jobs, the ones pertaining to unstructured machine data & the internet-of-things has seen a whopping jump to 704% around the world over the last five years. (Source: Forbes)

This is a fulfilling time to start with Splunk jobs and ride the Big Data wave. With Splunk training, you can work as a Software Engineer, Systems Engineer or a Programming Analyst. With annual salaries lying within an impressive range of $84,000 to $120,000, Splunk is only going to empower and drive your IT career to phenomenal heights.

Learn Splunk with Edureka and take advantage of the career opportunities! For more details, click here.

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