Friday, February 09, 2007

Splunk. The search engine for IT data.

I headed over to the Splunk booth to see their product which is used for searching log files (and other files). My first question, before even seeing the demo, was: Why would I buy this when I could go out and purchase one of those new Google Mini appliances? I guess I wasn't the first to ask that question!

I was then treated to a pretty amazing demo that showed how a typical administrator would start to search for an event - like a failed logon - and how you could drill down through months of logs, do additional drill-down, context sensitive searches, output SQL tables, build graphics and "play" with the data in the most amazing ways - all from the browser. I absolutely understand why they are getting so much market attention...

- Very sexy and capable interface
- AJAX-based
- Intuitive
- Cross-platform, including Mac OSX
- Very, very fast

My only negative is they only run on Unix/Linux. No Windows! I can't refrain from this product management suggestion: Get a Windows version out as soon as possible guys. Please!

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