The history of Splunk

Splunk was designed from the beginning to allow people who were troubleshooting IT problems to search through their log files as easily as if using a search engine like Google. As a product, Splunk was conceived by founders Rob Das and Erik Swan between 2002 and 2004 after asking a number of people at 60-70 companies, how do you find problems in your infrastructure today? The answer was consistently that they would go through log files, and when asked about what tools they used, they tended to answer that they would write their own scripts and that they do everything manually. They also commented that they used Google to search for posts from other people who had solved the same problem. Rob and Erik thought, why not create a tool that allows people to search through log files as easily as they search the web using something like Google? So they built a prototype to demo at Linux World with the tagline of Google for log files, and since they offered a free download, people tried it, liked it, and told their friends—from there, Splunk spread virally from person to person and company to company.

The name Splunk was derived from asking people, what is it like to troubleshoot in your environment? One answer was that it was like digging through caves with headlamps and helmets on, and crawling through the muck trying to find the problem, and it took forever. A common term for going through caves is spelunking, so they decided to call the product Splunk. From that beginning, Splunk has evolved into the powerful big data and business analytics tool that the founders envisioned from the start.

You can watch Rob and Erik tell their story here: https://www.splunk.com/view/SP-CAAAGBY.