Splunk recently held their annual Splunk Live! for Arizona at the JW Marriott Scottsdale Camelback Inn Resort + Spa, featuring local customer presentations from Bechtel and CenturyLink. The following article was submitted by Yorokobi.

The following article was submitted by Yorobobi.

Splunk recently held their annual Splunk Live! for Arizona at the JW Marriott Scottsdale Camelback Inn Resort + Spa, featuring local customer presentations from Bechtel and CenturyLink.

What is Splunk, you may ask? From http://www.splunk.com/ :

You see servers and devices, apps and logs, traffic and clouds. We see data—everywhere. Splunk® offers the leading platform for Operational Intelligence. It enables the curious to look closely at what others ignore—machine data—and find what others never see: insights that can help make your company more productive, profitable, competitive and secure. What can you do with Splunk?
Just ask.

After registration and free breakfast, we gathered for the requisite sales pitch from Splunk and the customer presentations.

For the morning sessions we heard from Ryan Chapman of Bechtel Corporation who gave a presentation on how their Security Operations teams use Splunk to search for and report on vulnerabilities and attempted (or successful) intrusions to their servers, network appliances, and end-user workstations.

Following Ryan’s presentation we heard from Thom Waldahl, an engineer with CenturyLink who described how they used Splunk to correlate data from field agents to help reduce the number of dispatches to customers. CenturyLink uses data captured by the hand-held devices used by their field agents when installing or troubleshooting customer DSL lines. They correlate data such as loop length, signal-to-noise ratios, and firmware versions for connected devices and use this data to determine whether a customer requires a bonded connection or if a firmware upgrade is required.

At the conclusion of Thom’s presentation, we were treated to lunch, courtesy of Splunk then attended two of six possible break-out sessions presented by Splunk Engineers including “Getting Started with Splunk Enterprise – Hands-On”, “Getting Started with IT Service Intelligence Hands-On”, “DevOps Powered by Splunk,” “Splunk Enterprise for Information Security Hands-On,” “Machine Learning + Analytics in Splunk,” and “Taking Splunk to the Next Level”.

As is the tradition for Splunk, drinks were provided during the Happy Hour sponsored by several of Splunk’s partners or interested parties.

MajB