3. About National Research Corporation
• Founded in 1981
• Surveys from Patient Experience to Employee Commitment, Hospital
Governance, Health Risk Assessments, Patient Discharge Calls
• Over 2 million hospital patients surveyed annually.
• Offices through out the US and in Canada
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4. About Me
• Senior Systems Engineer
• In IT for over 14 years, but a technology addict since birth
• Worked for companies as small as 4 employees to a company
that spanned the globe with 55,000 employees
• This is my 2nd company where I have brought Splunk in
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8. Entering the Cave - First Splunk Experiences
• Why Splunk?
• The text message that changed my life
• Let me answer that
• Getting that first win
• “Who deleted that? I want some butts!”
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9. Mapping the Cave
• Useful Reporting
• Knowing what is going on in our infrastructure
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Text Message – Getting a text message from my boss who was at InterOp Las Vegas telling me to check out this company called Splunk.Let me answer that – Michael Wilde of Splunk answer questions I posted on my personal website.
Screenshot of when Michael Wilde answered my post on my personal site. Showing the level of customer support Splunk has. Talking how this is proven in the Splunk Answers site.
Story of the first time Splunk was used outside of the “testing group”. The story is about how we were monitoring AD and someone deleted an OU and everything in it. This person then during the outage call yelled out to everyone on the call “Who deleted that? I want some butts!”. The person on call asked me if that new product I was playing with (Splunk) stored that information. I checked and we did indeed have the AD event and it happened to be the person that was yelling on the phone.
Next few slides are to talk about moving the data in to graphical format for it to be easier and quicker to read. This will make it so not just those who love grep can understand the data. Making it pretty for management.
Screenshots from the Windows Security Operations Center app in Splunk.
Screenshots from our firewall logging dashboard that was written in a meeting for our CSO.
Talk about the experiences of showing management why these reports are important and how being able to see and predict what is going saves IT and the company money. Example would be seeing computers checking in to malicious sites could mean they have a virus or other malicious software. Even though our firewall is blocking the requests, it is helpful to clean the machines so that when the laptop travels outside our protected network (ie. Starbucks) that it doesn’t finish downloading the payload. Also so that they entire team knows what each other is doing. Saves time in that you don’t have to trace back and figure out why something was done or who did it.
Understand your data – knowing what you want to gather will help you figure out how much you need to help prevent a growth problem and having to beg for more money.Faster Disks and Archiving – Getting the bang for the buck in hardwareOnce people know about it, they want it – Got Splunk so our Systems Engineering team could see what is going on, now the app team wants it to be able to search all of the logs and management wants all the pretty graphs.