At Splunk we believe in the power and value of exploring and understanding  data. We happen to make amazing software that lets you do exactly that.

Splunk has helped slice data for Domino’s, tracked airplane traffic at JFK airport, and is even used to analyze people’s heartbeats. Splunk is used around the world by data geeks to  explore and find the many secrets hidden within the data.

Ok…but what is Splunk?

It’s software.  You download it and install it on a laptop, a server, or a thousand servers. You can access it through a browser.

People use it to search massive amounts of data in seconds.

How does Splunk help?

There’s an enormous amount of live data from your computer systems and smart devices that people have to sift and wade through every day. Doing that is time consuming, stressful, and a huge pain in the ass.

Splunk lets the data geeks search, report, and alert on any kind of data. On the fly you can organize information into nice tidy data sets, and from there you can calculate statistics and email people pretty charts.

Bullshit.

Well you’re not going to be emailing your boss a pie chart of “causes of lost revenue” in 15 minutes.  But that’s seriously possible in a couple of hours.  Out of the box, Splunk will parse data and extract out a lot of meaning, and if it doesn’t get everything, you can even teach it how to extract the juicy numbers and information from  your data. The data geeks love this.

You can download Splunk for free and try it for yourself (warning: data geek level 15 or higher is recommended).

Editor’s note: this post is adapted from David Carasso’s Dive Into Splunk. David, thanks for being awesome.