Travis Marlette - Splunk Best Practices

Travis Marlette has been working with Splunk since Splunk 4.0, and has over 7 years of statistical and analytical experience leveraging both Splunk and other technologies. He cut his teeth in the securities and equities division of the finance industry, routing stock market data and performing transactional analysis on stock market trading, as well as reporting security metrics for SEC and other federal audits.

His specialty is in IT operational intelligence, which consists of the lions share of many major companies. Being able to report on security, system-specific, and propriety application metrics is always a challenge for any company and with the increase of IT in the modern day, having a specialist like this will become more and more prominent.

Working in finance, Travis has experience of working to integrate Splunk with some of the newest and most complex technologies, such as:

Travis is has been certified for a series of Microsoft, Juniper, Cisco, Splunk, and network security certifications. His knowledge and experience is truly his most valued currency, and this is demonstrated by every organization that has worked with him to reach their goals.

He has worked with Splunk installations that ingest 80 to 150 GB daily, as well as 6 TBdaily, and provided value with each of the installations hes created to the companies thathes worked with. In addition he also knows when a project sponsor or manager requiresmore information about Splunk and helps them understand what Splunk is, and how it canbest bring value to their organization without over-committing.

According to Travis, "Splunk is not a 'crystal ball'that's made of unicorn tears, and bottledrainbows, granting wishes and immediate gratification to the person who possesses it. Its an IT platform that requires good resources supporting it, and is limited only by the knowledge and imagination of those resources". With the right resources, thats a good limitation for a company to have.

Splunk acts as a Rosetta Stone of sorts for machines. It takes thousands of machines, speaking totally different languages all at the same time, and translates that into something a human can understand. This by itself, is powerful.

His passion for innovating new solutions and overcoming challenges leveraging Splunkand other data science tools have been exercised and visualized every day each of his roles.Those roles are cross industry, ranging from Bank of New York and Barclay's Capital, tothe Federal Government.Thus far, he and the teams he has worked with have taken each of these organizationsfurther than they have ever been on their Splunk journey. While he continues to bringvisibility, add value, consolidate tools, share work, perform predictions, and implementcost savings, he is also are often mentioned as the most resourceful, reliable, and goofyperson in the organization.Travis says A new Splunk implementation is like asking your older brother to turn on afire hose so you can get a drink of water. Once its on, just remember to breathe.

About the Reviewer

Chris Ladd is a staff sales engineer at Splunk. He has been with Splunk for three years and has been a sales engineer for more than a decade. He has earned degrees from Southwestern University and the University of Houston. He resides in Chicago.

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Preface

Within the working world of technology, there are hundreds of thousands of different applications, all (usually) logging in different formats. As a