What to expect from Splunk .conf 2019
The Computer Weekly Developer Network team is off to Splunk .conf for the fourth consecutive year.
Splunk is a Data-to-Everything Platform, helping organisations to get a complete view of their data in real time and turn it into business outcomes.
The company is named after spelunkers, an American term for caving or ‘pot hole’ aficionados. Spelunkers wade through meandering cavernous underground caverns, Splunkers navigate their way through cavernous amounts of noisy machine data.
Since Splunk .conf 2018 we have seen new versions of the core Splunk Enterprise product (which now sits at version 7.3) and Splunk Cloud products – technologies designed to allow users (developers… and, increasingly, less technical users) to search and ‘ask questions’ of machine data, log files and other core system information.
As Splunk has already explained, machine data has the potential to deliver important insights if it can be associated and correlated to the devices that are generating it – and, interrelated to the staff members directly associated with it – and, to the business systems that the data itself runs inside.
Splunk .conf by numbers
In terms of numbers, Splunk is promising somewhere around 10,000 attendees, 72 partner pavilion members and 350 technical sessions delivering over 100,000 hours of data-related education.
In terms of tracks, .conf19 features the following: Developer: to build apps for Splunk Enterprise, Splunk Developer Cloud and see Splunk’s native functionality live. Also, Internet of Things: to explore use cases to see what Splunk can do for transportation needs, predictive maintenance etc.
Other tracks include Business Analytics: for insights on Splunk’s real-time analytics platform which helps blend all types of data. Also, Splunk Foundations/Platform
Understand: for real-world best practices along with steps for using, deploying and administering Splunk.
Data-to-Everything
Splunk seems to change its core tagline from time to time. It used to be the company that delivered ‘aha moments’… and this year it’s the company with the Data-to-Everything platform.
Recent news saw Splunk completed the acquisition of SignalFx, a SaaS player in real-time monitoring and metrics for cloud infrastructure, microservices and applications.
Splunk already has a significant hand in ITOM and AIOps, so with the addition of SignalFx, the company will aim to position itself as a new voice in ‘observability’ and Application Performance Monitoring (APM).
“We live in a cloud-first world, where developers must have the ability to monitor and observe cloud-native infrastructure and applications in real-time, whether via logs, metrics or tracing. The power of Splunk and SignalFx allows our customers to monitor any relevant data at massive scale,” said Doug Merritt, President and CEO, Splunk. “I’m thrilled to welcome SignalFx to the Splunk team, and can’t wait to show our customers how our data platform can help them turn data into doing.”
We will report live from the show itself and follow up with deeper data-developer related analysis.
The event agenda is found here and key hashtags include #splunkconf19 and #DataToEverything for this year.