James H. Baxter - Splunk 7.x Quick Start Guide: Gain business data insights from operational intelligence

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James H. Baxter is the owner/CEO of Machine Data Insights, Inc., a certified Splunk architect, and a developer and machine learning practitioner with over 35 years of experience in various engineering and analysis disciplines, including radio/satellite; networks; capacity and performance modelling; speech technology; packet-level analysis; programming; and Splunk architecture, administration, and machine learning solutions for companies including MCI, IBM, BP, Disney, and AMEX. James is also a private pilot and holds an Extra class amateur radio and FCC Radiotelephone license.

You can reach him at LinkedIn at James H. Baxter.

Yogesh Raheja is a certified DevOps and cloud expert with a decade of IT experience. He has expertise in technologies including OS, source code management, build and release tools, continuous integration/deployment/delivery tools, containers, configuration management tools, monitoring, logging tools, and public and private clouds. He loves to share his technical expertise worldwide at various forums, conferences, webinars, blogs, and on LinkedIn. He has authored Effective DevOps with AWS, Second Edition, Automation with Puppet 5, and Automation with Ansible, and has published his online courses on Udemy. He has reviewed multiple books for Packt, including Implementing Splunk 7, Third Edition, and Splunk Operational Intelligence Cookbook, Third Edition.

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Splunk is an increasingly popular platform for collecting, searching, monitoring, and analyzing ever-growing amounts of big data from applications, network devices, and Internet of Things sensors. Aggregating, centralizing, and analyzing log and event data with Splunk turns that data into answers regarding the health of machines and applications, counts and trends in customer transactions, security threats, and a multitude of other insights that may be valuable to a particular company or industry.

Over the last five years, Splunk has more than doubled its number of customers, which now totals over 13,000 in 110 countries, including 89 of the Fortune 100. Given the increasing trend and opportunity to profit from the valuable insights derived by leveraging machine learning (ML) techniques on large data sets, Splunk has positioned itself well for further growth by building ML into its premium applications, such as IT Service Intelligence, Enterprise Security, User Behavior Analytics, and Industrial Asset Intelligence, in order to provide real-time and predictive analytics in those environments, as well as providing the Machine Learning Toolkit for developing custom solutions. So, as far as the IT professional who likes to work with data and data systems is concerned, learning how to architect, implement, administer, and/or use Splunk for analyzing data is a safe and valuable career investment for the foreseeable future. This book was written with a view to helping you embark on that journey and learn the landscape as quickly as possible.

This book is intended for experienced IT personnel who are just getting started working with Splunk and who want or need to quickly get to the heart of the matters of architecting, implementing, and administering Splunk, as well as working with Splunk search and several key apps to extract value from collected data and/or help their user base to do so. Business users who need to leverage Splunk to extract useful data from Splunk by building reports, dashboards, and alerts, and perhaps even utilize the Machine Learning Toolkit or one of Splunk's premium apps, such as Enterprise Security, will also benefit from this book, as it is a quick read that will help them better understand and work with the underlying technology from which their rich datasets and solutions are derived, and gain insights that may foster ideas for extracting even more value from their data.