Broadcasting live from Las Vegas, from the Splunk Conference 2013, John Furrier and Dave Vellante, theCUBE co-hosts, caught up with Darren Dance, Unix Technical Lead with WorldPay.
WorldPay is a payments company that processes a lot of transactions face-to-face in the UK, which is also used worldwide, online. Talking about Splunk and its adoption in his company, Dance said that "When we first put Splunk into our organization it was purely to do operational intelligence problem solving, then we expanded that to customer facing scenarios, in order to reduce the customer contact time."
Bringing Splunk in was an easy process because Dance was familiar with the product. "I've seen it running and followed the project, we had a need for an application login engine, we brought it in at a small scale, and we started seeing real business value from the date of the collecting and the analysis that we were doing on it."
WorldPay's business case
The old way of doing business for WorldPay was to login on to each box individually, "trolling through the log files" using FindGraph and otherUnix tools. As data was not stored in one place, finding a particular issue didn't reveal if it also occurred anywhere else at the same time. In Splunk, you can look and find out if the issue is present elsewhere. It saves a lot of time.
Security challenges
Dance admitted they've tried hard to change the perception of Splunk, from an out-of-the-box solution to something their Enterprise security team perceived as a secure, better product.
As for security and compliance, Dance explained further: "I've seen a lot of Splunk deployments where there's a silo of Splunk. I'm a great believer in the highly available system, where all the data is going into one place, we share the resources so that we get the benefit from the resilience in the performance, but we need to control who has access to that data. And if you don't have need to access that data, you shouldn't have access to it."
Compliance is the nightmare scenario for a lot of developers, in Furrier's opinion. It comes down from the CFOs and the legal guys, while all the innovation takes place from the bottom up, generating a clash in the middle. Dance declared himself quite lucky that in his company Splunk has always been well known and appreciated.
About the new release (Splunk 6 -- read details here), Dance says it looks really nice, but he anticipates a small period of adjustment. He's seriously considering migrating to it in the near future. Security teams are really keen on Splunk, as they like the benefits it offers.
"Is it because the search and indexing or ease of use?" asked Furrier. "It's a combination of both, but from the infrastructure point of view it's the scalability. If the searches start run slowly, you can put another piece of hardware at the problem, and that's easy to do," said Dance.
As for choosing Splunk over other products, that was easy, said Dance. "We looked at several open source alternatives and yes, they're free, but you have three or four products to give you the same result as Splunk. You start to put the tools together and that's not a solution, but a bunch of products."
Advice for Splunk regarding open source?
"Keep an on it for features being offered and, if they're bringing good stuff to the table, embrace it, don't resist change. In this industry, if you resist change, you die."
@thecube #theCUBE #Splunk #SiliconANGLE @Splunk
#SplunkConf
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Darren Dance, WorldPay | Splunk .conf2013
Broadcasting live from Las Vegas, from the Splunk Conference 2013, John Furrier and Dave Vellante, theCUBE co-hosts, caught up with Darren Dance, Unix Technical Lead with WorldPay.
WorldPay is a payments company that processes a lot of transactions face-to-face in the UK, which is also used worldwide, online. Talking about Splunk and its adoption in his company, Dance said that "When we first put Splunk into our organization it was purely to do operational intelligence problem solving, then we expanded that to customer facing scenarios, in order to reduce the customer contact time."
Bringing Splunk in was an easy process because Dance was familiar with the product. "I've seen it running and followed the project, we had a need for an application login engine, we brought it in at a small scale, and we started seeing real business value from the date of the collecting and the analysis that we were doing on it."
WorldPay's business case
The old way of doing business for WorldPay was to login on to each box individually, "trolling through the log files" using FindGraph and otherUnix tools. As data was not stored in one place, finding a particular issue didn't reveal if it also occurred anywhere else at the same time. In Splunk, you can look and find out if the issue is present elsewhere. It saves a lot of time.
Security challenges
Dance admitted they've tried hard to change the perception of Splunk, from an out-of-the-box solution to something their Enterprise security team perceived as a secure, better product.
As for security and compliance, Dance explained further: "I've seen a lot of Splunk deployments where there's a silo of Splunk. I'm a great believer in the highly available system, where all the data is going into one place, we share the resources so that we get the benefit from the resilience in the performance, but we need to control who has access to that data. And if you don't have need to access that data, you shouldn't have access to it."
Compliance is the nightmare scenario for a lot of developers, in Furrier's opinion. It comes down from the CFOs and the legal guys, while all the innovation takes place from the bottom up, generating a clash in the middle. Dance declared himself quite lucky that in his company Splunk has always been well known and appreciated.
About the new release (Splunk 6 -- read details here), Dance says it looks really nice, but he anticipates a small period of adjustment. He's seriously considering migrating to it in the near future. Security teams are really keen on Splunk, as they like the benefits it offers.
"Is it because the search and indexing or ease of use?" asked Furrier. "It's a combination of both, but from the infrastructure point of view it's the scalability. If the searches start run slowly, you can put another piece of hardware at the problem, and that's easy to do," said Dance.
As for choosing Splunk over other products, that was easy, said Dance. "We looked at several open source alternatives and yes, they're free, but you have three or four products to give you the same result as Splunk. You start to put the tools together and that's not a solution, but a bunch of products."
Advice for Splunk regarding open source?
"Keep an on it for features being offered and, if they're bringing good stuff to the table, embrace it, don't resist change. In this industry, if you resist change, you die."
@thecube #theCUBE #Splunk #SiliconANGLE @Splunk
#SplunkConf
