Watch Out Vegas Here We Come
It has been a couple of years since I last attended the Splunk conference and after hearing such positive reports on the last few, I was keen to see for myself how the event had moved on. So packing up my virtual Fez I headed off for Vegas, yes we did say Vegas, to mix with 11,000 fellow Splunkers for a week of breakout sessions, meetups, keynotes and the odd party night thrown in for good measure – tough decision I know, but sometimes I do have to put work first….
Armed with my Splunk event app, I went to sessions covering dashboarding, mobile Splunk, security, financial services, devops, hands on labs, best practices, tips & tricks, although I did decide to give the Splunk University a miss this year.
Choosing a session to write about would not be an easy task, in the end I decided to highlight one which I expect will come in handy for future reference.
Side By Side
A question I have been asked a number of times is what’s the difference between Splunk and Elk or why would I choose Splunk. “Because I say so…” never seemed to satisfy so when I saw Kate Lawrence-Gupta’s presentation titled “Lets Chat About Splunk and Elk…” I thought this would be useful to have in the old kit bag.
I know what you’re thinking, Kate works for Splunk so this is only going to go one way, I must admit that did cross my mind as well, however, Kate addresses this early in the session and to be fair I think she covered both products from a relatively neutral standpoint.
The presentation had three parts to it, logical architecture, pros & cons and finally what would a generic deployment look like side by side.
For me this was a good technical session, delivered by someone who in my view came across as a techie first and Splunker second, filling in a number of gaps in my knowledge with regard to the Elk architecture whilst highlighting some of the key differentiators between the two products.
Choose But Choose Wisely
This was a presentation designed to give the audience a side by side view of both products together with some insight that will allow them to assess based on what’s important to them.
The good news is that for once, what happens in Vegas doesn’t have to stay in Vegas, so I would recommend clicking on the link and having a watch yourself.
