Splunk is a software platform to search, analyze and visualize the machine-generated data gathered from the websites, applications, sensors, devices etc. which make up your IT infrastructure and business.

To tell you in a nutshell, machine data is:

• Complex to understand
• May or may not be in an unstructured format
• Not suitable for making analysis / visualization

This is where a tool like Splunk comes in handy. You can feed the machine data to Splunk, which will do the dirty work (data processing) for you. Once it processes and extracts the relevant data, you will be able to easily locate where and what the problems were. Create automated alerts, dashboards and reports for management, or feed other systems higher processed and analyzed data.

Your input data can be in any format for e.g. .csv, or json or other formats. There are a variety of collectors, or agents available to collect and parse existing systems.

UMD has used Splunk for over 10 years, and has a valuable investment in a rich and redundant ecosystem. Additionally, Splunk has several initiates for Non-Profit institutions use of Splunk for research purposes.