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SplunkBase Brings IT Troubleshooting Wiki to the Masses
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Mon Apr 03, 2006 01:02 PM
from the room-full-of-support-techs-is-usually-a-bad-thing dept.
from the room-full-of-support-techs-is-usually-a-bad-thing dept.
OSS_ilation writes "IT troubleshooting firm Splunk is using LinuxWorld Boston as a platform to formally launch Splunk Base, a global wiki that will offer IT pros a free-of-charge venue to exchange troubleshooting information, tools and fixes. Splunk is promising that the wiki is completely vendor neutral, and can be compared to Wikipedia, the online open encyclopedia that is regulated and updated by the community-at-large. Users don't even have to have a copy of Splunk Professional to use it. From the article: 'If you believe the research from firms like Framingham, Mass.-based IDC, then Splunk Base has arrived at a key moment. According to IDC, companies will spend more than $100 billion this year on managing the world's data centers. And with virtualization quickly becoming an IT buzzword in 2006, the complexity and costs could increase.'"
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splunk base (Score:4, Funny)
Re:splunk base (Score:3, Funny)
Obligatory (Score:5, Funny)
Eww....
-m
You miss the point. (Score:3, Informative)
how long until (Score:4, Insightful)
A little late to the party, don't you think? (Score:3, Interesting)
What does this tool offer that's better in any way?
Move along. There's nothing to see.
Re:A little late to the party, don't you think? (Score:3, Informative)
Google, as great as it is with other shit, usually returns Expert Exchange as the first couple of hits on any search for help. Boo.
I welcome any open and free wiki competitor to EE.
Unregistered EE usage (Score:5, Informative)
I will say that the unregistered EE is heavy on the advertising, and they make it fairly difficult to register for a free account [experts-exchange.com]. This signs you up as an "expert," although any registered user, paid or not, can answer questions.
You get a limited number of points per month to ask questions with, and need to earn 10,000 expert points (answer a question for 500 points with an 'A' grade, and you get 2000 expert points) to get free premium membership, then 3000 pts/mo to maintain that membership. If you are knowledgeable about anything tech, you can do it easy.
The tech forums are extremely well moderated, and the caliber of people who answer questions is fairly high.
Parent
Re:Experts Exchange - scroll down! (Score:4, Informative)
Nice troll though!
"View Solution" would be what the OP called [lame subscription button].
If you had bothered to read the OP you would have scrolled down past the lame View Solution button. There you will find all answers to the question. I've just checked it for the link you gave and they are there.
Nice troll though!
Parent
Re:A little late to the party, don't you think? (Score:5, Insightful)
Hardly. This looks promising.
Parent
Re:A little late to the party, don't you think? (Score:5, Insightful)
Expert's Exchange requires you to scroll three screens past advertisements from the actual question to the answers (when they're actually available without registering, that is). Not to mention the disgusting IntelliTXT ads they insert into the actual text...
Google can be frustrating, especaially if your search terms center around things like "C++".
Thus, I'm open to better ways of doing things, and I'll be looking at this to see if it is one.
Parent
Re:A little late to the party, don't you think? (Score:5, Informative)
Or do what I do, add "-site:experts-exchange.com" to my search criteria. The search won't include links from that domain.
Parent
Re:A little late to the party, don't you think? (Score:3, Insightful)
Wikipedia: is an encyclopedia, not a help forum for computer problems.
Expert's Exchange: just plain sucks.
Google: is a good resource, but does not allow collaboration and two-way communication.
Sir, can I interest you in some Splunk? (Score:4, Interesting)
Have a look at their demo - I was not impressed. Plenty of tools do the same thing. Both Open Source and proprietary.
A troubleshooting Wiki would be nice, though. Give ExpertsExchange some competition when it comes to IT peer questions and answers.
Great Concept (Score:3, Insightful)
Being an IT professional, it is hard to track down solutions to difficult problems using Google alone. If you Google a problem, odds are you are going to wind up finding a message board where someone has the same issue, but no solution has been posted.
How will the content be licensed? Who will own it? (Score:4, Insightful)
How does a person know, when they're contributing, that Splunk isn't going to take the site's content at some point down the road, and turn it into some steaming pile of ads and subscription fees like Experts Exchange?
If it's a wiki, it's difficult to separate individual contributions, so a Slashdot-style "Comments are owned by the Poster" probably wouldn't work. The actual work has to be owned by somebody, and frankly I don't know Splunk from Adam and I'd certainly question whether I wanted to spend a lot of time writing an article if at some point it might just become part of their "Premium Membership" service, or if they won't let other people mirror it as a backup in case they decide that being 'community oriented' isn't paying the bills in the way they thought it would.
Parent
traffic LEAK... (Score:3, Informative)
Who's going to proofread? (Score:4, Insightful)
I've also worked with some excellent techs that I've tried to learn from as much as possible, and I try to emulate as I work with customers. These are the ones that see a problem and dig in and try and solve it. Yeah, it takes time but the knowledge base built up can be helpful.
So.. on a database like this.. who's to watch the submissions to select if it's a real tested and found solution, versus something else that doesn't really work? And who's to say the solution provided is from an actual PC tech and not an armchair one? If I had a dime for every time a "friend that knows lots about computers" screws one up..
Missing from the article summary (Score:3, Informative)
So come on editors, it's the announcement for the release of a new wiki, which despite the $DIETY-awful name, might be a useful resource. How about, you know, linking to it? I hear the web is good for that.
Eh, this may be good ... (Score:3, Insightful)
I would love (and avidly use) such a beast with the capabilities they are talking about. If I am not mistaken, I could search for something like
VT Enabled Xen Windows 2003 Server
And get what I need out of it quickly. I've also got a laundry list of very odd cryptic errors in openSSI I'd love to find the causes of
Looks like experts exchange is about to be selling cheap ad space
Already exists (Score:5, Interesting)
You should look at splunk (Score:4, Interesting)
Here's where they shine: finding data lost in a log file. Picture if you will a log file with free-form text in parts and XML in other parts. With no training about what the log looked like, their tool could do a great job of identifying patterns in the free-form text - essentially blocks or "records" of data there, and pulling out the XML sections.
You can search for patterns in the data, and splunk will help identify them for you. The data import and pattern-matching parts of their code are platform agnostic. There are no adapters to buy, and no "training" to find useful data patterns. I think that they are doing a good job on the technologyside of things, and it's definitely worth the time to look at this tool.
Please note: I have no affiliation with Splunk. I'm not even one of their customers. I have no reason to promote their product. I've looked at it and they do a good job of finding obscure data.
Respectfully,
Anomaly
Did you guys look at it? (Score:4, Insightful)
This is nothing like wikipedia. It is a log file aggregator. It's a program that transmits and indexes log files on your UNIX/LINUX machine(s). How is that like wikipedia in the slightest? Granted, users can comment on log entries and create a knowledge base, but that doesn't make it wikipedia at all.
I think they've made a cool tool here. I can see it being useful. But the fact that they are targeting businesses and yet it trasmits all log data to a remote location will make most businesses uneasy. If the application could be setup to keep all data internal, this could be a neat tool for system administrators. But in its current form, it's only really good for hobbyists and other people who don't mind having the guts of their servers on the web ready to be searched by strangers.
Re:Did you guys look at it? (Score:4, Informative)
Splunk = the log file aggregator you looked at, that you have to pay for, and is not a wiki.
Splunk Base = the free wiki that the
PS - Splunk is not intended for displaying your logfiles to the world, it is only intended to provide a nicer, Ajax-based website interface for grepping your log files. Ideally it will be used only on the corporate intranet, not the public internet. If SysAdmins or Developers need access to it from outside the internet, they can VPN into the intranet and access it that way. There's no reason to make this available publicly through the firewall.
Parent
Splunk base is a good idea (Score:4, Funny)
Possible suggestions for new SplunkBase names:
DeadPCBase
FixItYerself
FindOutWTFHappened
YouCanDoIT
WherestheNEkey
IsThisThingOn
MyPuterBroke
DamnYouBillGates