Your Big Data Beard Guide to .conf19 Sessions

Splunk is increasingly at the forefront of new approaches to IT Operations, especially in disruptive ‘cloud-native’ businesses. This session will help you understand how ‘New Ops’ techniques like Observability, Site Reliability Engineering, SLOs/SLIs, Error Budgets, ChatOps, and Blameless Post-Mortems can help your IT Ops team; and how you can adopt ‘New Ops’ technologies like Containers, Microservice Architectures, Machine Learning, Orchestration, Predictive Analytics, and AI for IT Ops.

Monitoring infrastructure operations is easy with Splunk, but it takes more than great SPL skills to build and end to end view of infrastructure supporting your mission critical applications. In this session, you’ll hear from an experienced Site Reliability Engineer how Dell EMC’s investment in Splunk apps across their platforms makes it easier for Splunk users to monitor infrastructure and integrate these these insights into an overall application performance monitoring strategy.

Ninjas know secrets. Stealthy secrets hidden under black hoodies collected from the dark corners of the world about how to architect Splunk deployments the right way for optimal performance and scalability. Step out of the shadows of the clouds and learn how the best practices that power some of the largest, on-premises deployments of Splunk around the world. Learn how Splunk premium apps impact architecture choices massively. Determine if SmartStore is right for your environment and size it for maximum performance and benefit. Discover exactly how you as a Splunk administrator can communicate your needs to IT operations and their vendors to insure your success. Get your hoodie and toe-splitting shoes ready as you become an even better Splunk Ninja!

The potential cost-savings and operational benefits of SmartStore are impressive, but they are not reserved only for those organizations deploying Splunk in the cloud. Learn how Dell EMC delivers cloud-scale object storage for on-premises deployments of SmartStore and how you can leverage best practices learned from some of the world’s largest global Splunk deployments.

Digital transformation is on everyone’s mind as organizations embark on this journey that involves adoption of new technologies, IT modernization, enhancing security posture all the while ensuring mission success.  Innovative leaders are increasingly turning to data analytics to navigate these challenges – while some organizations have realized tangible benefits, others are looking for guidance and a path forward.  This informative Birds of a Feather session will help the attendees navigate this complex journey including how others have leveraged data to make confident decisions in their path to success.

Is managing your growing list of indexes like herding cattle? Is your Master Node struggling against a stampede of buckets? Are you ducking bullets to satisfy data access requirements at the expense of usability or search performance? This session will demonstrate the advanced, role-based data access approach being used by several large Splunk customers. You will learn alternative methods to satisfy complex data access requirements without having to allocate hundreds or thousands of indexes. This method will allow you to focus on usability and search performance as your primary criteria for designing and managing your indexing strategy.

The retail industry is on the verge of a major transformation through the use of advanced analytics and machine learning technology. To keep up with consumers and be able to make decisions quickly, retailers are increasingly using data across all channels to compete on experience, service, and urgency. This Birds of a Feather session will help attendees understand the digital imperatives essential fro retail leaders to succeed amid a large industry transformation and how others have leveraged data and machine learning to optimize the conversion funnel at scale.

Everything breaks at 3:00 a.m. No one wants a team of engineers managing incidents on little to no sleep. Think about how tired you were the morning after the last all-nighter you pulled. Coffee can only do so much. If you work in any type of technical operations role you know how easy it is for on-call to take over your life. When managing an on-call team, you must think about the human side of on-call to avoid employee burnout and alert fatigue. In this session we will outline a four-step process to streamline incident management, review how to manage alerts through VictorOps, and give your team their lives back!