What do you think?
Rate this book
Exploring Splunk
Big data has incredible business value, and Splunk is the best tool for unlocking that value. Exploring Splunk shows you how to pinpoint answers and find patterns obscured by the flood of machinegenerated data. This book uses an engaging, visual presentation style that quickly familiarizes you with how to use Splunk. You'll move from mastering Splunk basics to creatively solving real-world problems, finding the gems hidden in big data.
Part Exploring Splunk
Part Solution Recipes
Part Exploring Splunk
Part Solution Recipes
168 pages, Paperback
First published August 6, 2012
5 people are currently reading
43 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
December 31, 2014
Oh my word. I'm grasping at straws now trying to find two more books to finish off my 65 books in 2014 challenge. And I REALLY did not expect this search to turn up any results. But look! This short little book (I'm not sure I could even call it a textbook) is here on Goodreads! I got this as a freebie from the vendor, and while I was expecting a bit of a newbie introduction to Splunk, thats not what this is. This is a one man's high overview of Splunk and some of the advanced features Splunk does. I wouldn't recommend this to first users, or, perhaps, to me it was simply dis-useful besides a desk ornament.
June 30, 2021
Splunk is familiar to those in the IT world who need to search the massive amounts of data that a computer, particularly a web server, generates. The software – available in a downloadable, free format from their website – epitomizes the definition of Big Data. The old way of searching logs involved opening up text files manually, searching for certain words, and compiling results in a spreadsheet. To replace it, the Splunk team created Search Processing Language (SPL) and wrote this book to explain it to the masses.
The audience of this book includes not only computer operators but also those on the IT business team. Indeed, SPL can serve business needs perhaps more then even IT professionals. For example, SPL provides a means for analysts to look up from logs website statistics over time. It can even compile them in helpful monitoring reports or display them in a chart. Alerts can be made to point out potentially dangerous conditions over email.
Although this book was written in 2012 (nine years ago at the time of my writing – an eternity in the tech world), SPL is still used in Splunk. Indeed, the Splunk documentation website maintains additional material to help the user better use the software. Perhaps most helpful to IT specialists, the last three chapters contain “cookbook” recipes to perform common procedures with SPL. Thus, someone can look up, modify, and then execute a series of instructions to analyze large amounts of data from their own system.
From a software design point of view, this book can be used as inspiration to architect impressive search features. It clearly shares how Splunk software is built and what features make it powerful. Efficient, easy-to-learn languages like SPL extend the power of the computer into big data sources like computer logs. Such an approach can be adapted to other uses in other domains. Thus can software developers learn from Splunk’s example.
My main criticism of this book is that at 154 pages, it’s a bit too short. It reads like it’s a section in a larger work instead of a whole work in and of itself. I’m not sure what I’d add to expand or accompany it since the documentation website is thorough (and free). Nonetheless, after only eight chapters (and a healthy appendix), I’m left wanting to extend some of the Splunk paradigm more. Perhaps I just need to spend more time with the software in my company’s data to discern new patterns inside…
The audience of this book includes not only computer operators but also those on the IT business team. Indeed, SPL can serve business needs perhaps more then even IT professionals. For example, SPL provides a means for analysts to look up from logs website statistics over time. It can even compile them in helpful monitoring reports or display them in a chart. Alerts can be made to point out potentially dangerous conditions over email.
Although this book was written in 2012 (nine years ago at the time of my writing – an eternity in the tech world), SPL is still used in Splunk. Indeed, the Splunk documentation website maintains additional material to help the user better use the software. Perhaps most helpful to IT specialists, the last three chapters contain “cookbook” recipes to perform common procedures with SPL. Thus, someone can look up, modify, and then execute a series of instructions to analyze large amounts of data from their own system.
From a software design point of view, this book can be used as inspiration to architect impressive search features. It clearly shares how Splunk software is built and what features make it powerful. Efficient, easy-to-learn languages like SPL extend the power of the computer into big data sources like computer logs. Such an approach can be adapted to other uses in other domains. Thus can software developers learn from Splunk’s example.
My main criticism of this book is that at 154 pages, it’s a bit too short. It reads like it’s a section in a larger work instead of a whole work in and of itself. I’m not sure what I’d add to expand or accompany it since the documentation website is thorough (and free). Nonetheless, after only eight chapters (and a healthy appendix), I’m left wanting to extend some of the Splunk paradigm more. Perhaps I just need to spend more time with the software in my company’s data to discern new patterns inside…
September 12, 2017
Meh.
I got this book for free and read it in about an hour. It's decent at describing Splunk at a very high level and giving a bunch of "recipes" (aka examples) of queries that you can run to query your data. It's OK as a reference manual, but in all reality, online resources are much better for this. I will probably never refer back to this book again, but there wasn't really anything WRONG with it...
I got this book for free and read it in about an hour. It's decent at describing Splunk at a very high level and giving a bunch of "recipes" (aka examples) of queries that you can run to query your data. It's OK as a reference manual, but in all reality, online resources are much better for this. I will probably never refer back to this book again, but there wasn't really anything WRONG with it...
April 6, 2021
Good manual to explain some basic terminologies.
July 8, 2015
A good starting point for Splunk, but will easily leave you needing a lot more information.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews