Big Data Analytics Using Splunk: Deriving Operational Intelligence from Social Media, Machine Data, Existing Data Warehouses, and Other Real-Time Streaming Sources

Big Data Analytics Using Splunk is a hands-on book showing how to process and derive business value from big data in real time. Examples in the book draw from social media sources such as Twitter (tweets) and Foursquare (check-ins). You also learn to draw from machine data, enabling you to analyze, say, web server log files and patterns of user access in real time, as the access is occurring. Gone are the days when you need be caught out by shifting public opinion or sudden changes in customer behavior. Splunk’s easy to use engine helps you recognize and react in real time, as events are occurring.

Splunk is a powerful, yet simple analytical tool fast gaining traction in the fields of big data and operational intelligence. Using Splunk, you can monitor data in real time, or mine your data after the fact. Splunk’s stunning visualizations aid in locating the needle of value in a haystack of a data. Geolocation support spreads your data across a map, allowing you to drill down to geographic areas of interest. Alerts can run in the background and trigger to warn you of shifts or events as they are taking place.

With Splunk you can immediately recognize and react to changing trends and shifting public opinion as expressed through social media, and to new patterns of eCommerce and customer behavior. The ability to immediately recognize and react to changing trends provides a tremendous advantage in today’s fast-paced world of Internet business. Big Data Analytics Using Splunk opens the door to an exciting world of real-time operational intelligence.

• Built around hands-on projects
• Shows how to mine social media
• Opens the door to real-time operational intelligence

What you’ll learn

• Monitor and mine social media for trends affecting your business
• Know how you are perceived, and when that perception is rising or falling
• Detect changing customer behavior from mining your operational data
• Collect and analyze in real time, or from historical files
• Apply basic analytical metrics to better understand your data
• Create compelling visualizations and easily communicate your findings

Who this book is for

Big Data Analytics Using Splunk is for those who are interested in exploring the heaps of data they have available, but don’t know where to start. It is for the people who have knowledge of the data they want to analyze and are developers or SQL programmers at a level anywhere between beginners and intermediate. Expert developers also benefit from learning how to use such a simple and powerful tool as Splunk.

Table of Contents

1. Part I: Splunk's Basic Operation: Getting to Know Splunk
2. Part I: Splunk's Basic Operation: Getting Data into Splunk
3. Part I: Splunk's Basic Operation: Processing and Analysing the Data
4. Part I: Splunk's Basic Operation: Visualizing the Results
5. Part I: Splunk's Basic Operation: Defining Alerts.
6. Part I: Splunk's Basic Operation: Web Site Monitoring  
7. Part I: Splunk's Basic Operation: Using Log Files to Create Advanced Analytics
8. Part II: Airline On-Time Performance Project: On-Time Project Description
9. Part II: Airline On-Time Performance Project: Getting Flight Data Into Splunk
10. Part II: Airline On-Time Performance Project: Analyzing Airlines, Airports, Flights, and Delays
11. Part II: Airline On-Time Performance Project: Analyzing a Specific Flight over Time 
12. Part III: Social Media: Analyzing Twitter Data
13. Part III: Social Media: Analyzing Foursquare Check-Ins
14. Part III: Social Media: Sentiment Analysis
15. Part IV: Architecture and Deployment: Distributed Topologies
16. Part IV: Architecture and Deployment: High Availability
17. Appendix A: The Performance of Splunk
18. Appendix B: Related Applications