Preface

For some time now, Splunk has been a leading light in providing software that allows its users to search, monitor, and visualize data. The massive expansion in machine data seems endless but we are fortunate to have the tools to deliver and analyze this data and allow us to strip out the irrelevant information, presenting to our user base the important data that will help guide business and technology decisions. Two major strengths that Splunk provides are the ability to quickly analyze your data as well as the ability to present this information to your user in an attractive and customizable way. This presentation layer sitting within Splunk as part of the Splunk Web Framework is a powerful development platform from which we can almost endlessly customize the data we are providing. This book focuses directly on the Splunk Web Framework. It is designed to provide hands-on and interesting examples with step-by-step instructions, to help developers think of Splunk as a complete platform instead of software for searching, monitoring, and analyzing machine-generated data. This book provides different and interesting examples instead of the usual “Log, Index, Search, and Graph” and has the reader thinking in terms of Splunk being the first tool they think of when needing to resolve any problem.