A very quick overview of Splunk concepts and commands
Category: splunk
-
State of Splunk Careers 2021: Accelerating Salaries & Opportunities for Practitioners
An interesting read about how Splunk practitioners have higher compensation, more portable skills, and career advancement.
-
My full time job is to work on engineering productivity.
Often folks ask me what I do every day / every week?
I often tell them what I’m working on this quarter.
Quarterly Focus
Well, the first quarter in 2019, my focus is on creating coding labs and content for new engineers that join Splunk so they understand what tools are available for them that is uniquely only available at Splunk.
Training New Hires
Every week, I will meet with all newly hired engineers for 2 hours and show them the tools available to them. Every 2 weeks, we will meet for 6 hours and they will do the coding labs we have created for them. I will likely talk with them for 30 minutes about the products at the company, the community, my own story at Splunk and what makes for an effective and impactful engineer. What is the culture in the engineering organization?
Tech Talks
On an ongoing basis, I will solicit internal and external folks who have worked on interesting problems to present during our weekly tech talks. The purpose is to share the work so other might learn and make use of the work themselves. Or the talks are to inspire them to think bigger and beyond their daily work.
Listening
Anther part of my work is just listening to engineers and they may reach out to me to help them get their work done. This could be a wide range of topics. It could range from just looking for the name of someone who could answer a technical problem. It could be just brain storming with me about a problem they have in finding a solution to replicate a problem with a particular mobile app. It could be helping them finding a solution when they feel overwhelmed with too many meetings.
Systemic Solutions
When I listen to an engineer on a specific problem, I often would try to help them solve the initial problem. Make sure they are unblocked. Then my real job kicks it and I need to figure out whether this is a more systemic problem. I would reach out to other engineers and other engineering managers and figure out who else has the same question or problem. Or I would write a document so that others could benefit in the future. I could also create a backlog EPIC so the team of 3 engineers might brainstorm with me on a more longer term and thorough solution.
Non Technical
Still to be written, Saturday badminton awaits
Mentoring
Still to be written, Saturday badminton awaits
Engineering
Still to be written, Saturday badminton awaits
-
When I was running a scrum team at Splunk focusing on engineering productivity
- Quarterly goals on top
- Swim lanes for Ready, in progress, verify and done
-
Splunk’s Company Mission
I like the simple and clear mission:
We make machine data accessible, usable and valuable to everyone
Update: Oct 24, 2018
2 years at Splunk so far
Personal
- I’ve started a large community of badminton players and even setup a badminton net in our court yard
- I’ve grown a community of engineering helping each other virtually on Slack
- I’ve learned a lot about Splunk’s product and use it everyday to measure and improve our engineering processes.
- I’ve created dimsum-tuesday, bootclubs, coffee-geeks communities.
- I‘ve launched a company wide mentorship program partnering across the company
Professionally
- I’ve written a lot of documentation and bootstrapped Friday tips to help engineers find and connect with each other
- I’ve bootstrapped company wide weekly tech talks along with 4 other people
- I am running the monthly engineering bootcamp for our new hires and iterating on improving it every month
- I’m part of the leadership team to help Splunk move towards continuous delivery
- I’ve done some hands on work to help get Docker adopted more widely at Splunk
- My direct manager, Kurt Chase is an awesome human being who cares a lot about the people who work for him
- And most of all, I love working with my kanban team and their passion and open windiness during our usual lunch time and early morning debates on life, technical discussions, security and how to make things better
My original post
I joined Splunk as a software engineer helping internal engineers be more productive, build tools, processes, documentation to make their lives easier. I have only been at Splunk since April 2016 so I have focused on observing how software development works here and trying to absorb and learn from the smart people here.
Recently I have been focusing my time on hiring engineers into my team as software automation engineers and when I talk with them, it started to crystallize in my mind why I love working at Splunk.
Mission
I like the simple and clear mission:
We make machine data accessible, usable and valuable to everyone
The product is loved by our users
People who use Splunk love our product. This is important to me personally and hopefully also important to engineers who work on the product. It started out as a product to let system administrators and developers analyze their logs and quickly grew into a product that is used up and down across an organization to get insights into all the data spurring out of all of our ‘machines’ (web servers, point of sales systems, key entries, thermometers, mobiles devices). It lets you make decisions based on real time data your current machines already emit without being overwhelmed.
Hard core engineering
The core product from Splunk is our forwarder and indexing software with a REST API. This core software has been hardened over 10+ years and its cross platform (Linux on various CPU platforms, Mac, Windows, Solaris). We work in C++, Python and JavaScript. The software is shipped to customers on premise, so they have to be rock solid and well tested. The C++ programmers here are hard core.
I came from Yahoo, where scale matters. Splunk is also building scalable software because the demand of our customer requires us to scale to huge amount of data with real time requirements. Think of how much data is generated by a customer with a simple N tier architecture. Now Splunk has to index and search across all that data, in real or near real time.
People
Splunk has been in business for a long time, since 2004. So far, I have noticed a few common traits. We are
- customer focused
- metrics driven
- value action above talking
We have a strong culture from our founders and now our employees have carry this culture forward. Everyone I have met at Splunk really enjoy being here, we pride ourselves in helping each other as well as challenging each other to innovate and disrupt.
Metrics driven
We Splunk ourselves. We use the Splunk product internally to measure ourselves. It took me a few weeks to get use to this new way of thinking. “If it is not worth measuring, it is not worth doing”. While we are not perfect here, it’s ingrain in our culture.
Not selling ads
Instead of selling advertising or user data like many consumer internet companies, we sell a product that people use and are willing to pay money for because there is a value proposition. This is personally important to me after working at Yahoo for over 16 years where the core business was about harvesting user behavior and targeting ads to users. I have finally install ad blockers to say goodbye to online ads.
Engineering Productivity Focus
Join me at Splunk
You can browse for engineering careers here http://www.splunk.com/view/SP-CAAAGMJ and get in touch with me at tonytam.engineer@yahoo.com for a quick referral.
-
Marking my 2nd month at Splunk.
I really love the culture of being data driven at everything we do. Being here at Splunk already opened up my mind as to how I can grow and learn as an engineer because of the people and the relentless focus on execution and innovation.
Tony Tam 