Splunk

cmothebean

Member
C
Join Date
Nov 2011
Location
Brisbane
Posts
14
Hi,

One of my suppliers is pushing Splunk. The brief pitch was that one can setup borders on variables and proactively alert to things going haywire. Sounds a bit like all those warnings we already have in SCADA that the operations team ignores! Anyone had any experience with it?

Their spiel:
Splunk is a leading platform for any kind of industrial data. With it you gain Real-time Insights across all Operational Systems, create deeper diagnostics, faster troubleshooting and all whilst using a flexible platform.
This enables you to improve operations, ensure safety and compliance, perform preventative maintenance, better manage the lifecycle of assets and move from being reactive to proactive in your operations.

We can monitor Technologies such as:
images lost in copy/paste - industrial assets, core OT, core IT

When correlating your Operational Data in real-time, Splunk can detect patterns, trends and anomalies to alert when a problem is happening or about to. When you combine your Operational data with your IT and relational data - you gain new and unique insights which are then used for diagnosing those problems and troubleshooting them within the minute.

This link is a success story from an energy company who implemented Splunk into their environment with SCADA Systems to gain visibility of their pipelines but ended up with that and more
https://www.splunk.com/en_us/customers/success-stories/energy-company.html

There is also a webinar being held, an Introduction to Splunk and SCADA on the 21st of March if you are interested
http://www.dna.com.au/vendors/Intro...A/Introduction-to-Splunk-and-SCADA-March-2017
Click to expand...
 
I started playing buzzword bingo with that sales pitch and won before I got past the third line. As far as actual detail of what it does and how it works, I'm completely in the dark.

Sounds very much like something that can be implemented with your existing tools. But, I have never heard of it, seen it, or used it, so I can't really give you anything worthwhile!
 
Never used it, just saw the ad. It reads like an IT tool, not sure how useful it would be for Automation.

If it just allows you to look at various data, that's not impressive to me. Lots of tools exist to visualize data.

If it actually understands the data, without you having to create all the rules and intelligence youself, I see great value there. If Splunk says "Hey, look at this! I've seen this error before, it means XYZ is coming", that is potentially pretty cool.

The difference is adding institutional knowledge vs giving an institution a platform to use its knowledge. Lots of platforms are out there, very few of them actually have any intelligence.
 
Last I knew, It didn't understand the data itself inherently. There were rules and packages put together by the community and the vendor that would help, but it did take a good deal of work to setup.
 
Dravik said:
it did take a good deal of work to setup.
Click to expand...

This was my initial thought. It is tough in such a dynamic production driven environment to find the time to implement these sorts of things, which once setup should save us time. The slow march up the hill to a proactive workplace!

It seems to have a lot of good customers but their use cases are mostly irrelevant to me. https://www.splunk.com/en_us/customers.html
 
This sounds too good to be true. The TCO is 400% less. Then again, maybe they don't understand math. Makes me wonder what other information they are exaggerating.
 
Software like this is definitely most focused around Infrastructure management. We used something similar to monitor servers, switches, voip phones, wireless scanners, printers, etc.
While we did have it tied into our SCADAs it was from an OS level to give us advance notice of issues, and some odd monitoring of processes running.

Very useful, but yeah the use case would be interesting from a purely process standpoint.
 
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