What is Splunk?

Splunk is an American company based in San Francisco, California. The company was founded in 2003 by Michael Baum, Rob Das, and Erik Swan with a mission to make it much easier to assemble and analyze the data needed to run and troubleshoot a datacenter.

The company’s main product is Splunk Enterprise (often simply called Splunk). This product can index structured or unstructured textual machine-generated data and enables you to perform real-time and historical search, as well as reports and statistical analysis. The company offers some additional products, such as Splunk Cloud, Splunk Enterprise Security, and Hunk (a data analytics platform).

Here are some of the features of Splunk Enterprise:

  • it can index any type of data; however, it works best with data that contain timestamps.
  • it provides powerful search, analysis and visualization capabilities to empower users of all types.
  • it creates a central repository for searching data from many different sources.
  • it offer hundreds of apps and add-ons that can enhance and extend the Splunk platform.
  • it helps you gain valuable Operational Intelligence from your machine-generated data.

Splunk Enterprise is priced based on maximum daily aggregate volume of uncompressed data indexed, expressed in gigabytes per day. Splunk Enterprise runs with either an Enterprise license or a Free license. A Free license is valid for 60 days and allows up to 500 MB of indexed data per day.

Splunk is available for Windows, Linux, Solaris, and Mac OS.
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