Splunk .conf 2018: The Top 7 Sessions You Can’t Miss

Splunk conference is just around the corner, and we’ve got your back with the top news and sessions you won’t want to miss out on.

Splunk Conference 2018 is opening its gates in the most magical place on earth: Disney World. While Mickey and Minnie are attractions on their own, Splunk is offering some worthy contenders that’ll catch your attention, and teach you a thing or two about your application, workflow, logs and much more.

To help you navigate through the event, we’ve collected some presenters and topics that will be covered during this event. Think of this as your handy (and maybe magical?) guidebook for Splunk .conf 2018.

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— OverOps (@overopshq) September 20, 2018

What’s New at Splunk?

The annual conference is a great place to learn about the new features and elements in Splunk, and as you can guess, most of the sessions revolve around that. You’ll find sessions that’ll show you how to better understand what’s happening inside your servers and applications, teach you how to become a Splunk Token Master and how to improve the tool with SplunkJS.

Another main feature is the new Splunk IT Service Intelligence (ITSI) dashboard, which brings artificial intelligence to events so you can get visibility across IT and business services. It enables you to use AI to go from reactive to predictive IT.

Why is it so interesting? Since it focuses on data, and its importance in detecting, finding and predicting issues within the application and servers. If you want to hear more about how to add granular set of contextual insights to help you use additional data beyond log files, and provide an incredibly useful baseline for deep, effective AI, you’re more than welcome to visit our booth (M21 in the Pacific Hall) .

We don’t want to spoil anything, but we have a really cool raffle and swag that will knock your socks off. AND we have a special treat to our blog readers – Just come to our booth and say the magic words: Alex sent me (We have a limited number of special treats :wink: The sooner you arrive, the better!)

But enough about that, let’s see what else is waiting for us at Splunk .conf 18:

7 Sessions You Don’t Want to Miss

There’s a long list of sessions and talks during the four-day event, and with so many options to choose from, it can get pretty hectic. That’s why we went over the complete itinerary, and brought you 7 sessions we plan to attend:

• • State of DevOps – Expert Panel
  • How Did the Timesheet Catch the Spy?
  • Artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps)
  • The Do’s and Don’ts That Every IoT Project Should Be Built On
  • Predicting London Crime Rates Using Machine Learning Toolkit
  • What Is Your DevOps Team Actually Doing?

State of DevOps – Expert Panel

DevOps went through some changes over the past few years, some more welcome than others. In this panel, we’ll hear from Hal Rottenberg , Staff Sales Engineer and Andi Mann , Chief Technology Advocate from Splunk, as well as from Cesar Barria , Director Architecture at Cox Auto and Deepak Giridharagopal , CTO at Puppet about the current state of DevOps. This is an open discussion with the audience, which gives you a chance to take part and voice your opinion on the matter.

When? Tuesday, Oct 02, 4:45 p.m. – 5:30 p.m.

How Did the Timesheet Catch the Spy? Joke, or the Downfall of the Insider Threat

It’s the story of how a simple timesheet and the mixture of automation, machine learning and Splunk, cannot only thwart an insider threat but also provide highly detailed statistical analysis. Ben Lovley , Network Forensics/Threat Hunt from MOD Corsham shows how you can get stats for working hours, overtime, annual leave, on call, unusual work times and more, without having to do it manually.

When? Tuesday, Oct 02, 4:45 p.m. – 5:30 p.m.

Artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps)

The combination of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and IT operations brought us AIOps. In this session, Retesh Shah , Senior Manager at Accenture and Andreia Martins from Vodafone will illustrate how a time critical activity driven by experts across multiple applications has been replaced by a fully automated solution with the help of Artificial Intelligence.

When? Wednesday, Oct 03, 11:30 a.m. – 11:50 a.m.

Golden Rules – The Do’s and Don’ts That Every IoT Project Should Be Built On

IoT was first defined in 1991 and since the turn of the century, customers and businesses are expecting to see disruptive technology daily. Sadly, most projects are abandoned halfway through or the team gives up on their core principles right before the finishing line. When we take a look at the reasons why, it seems it can be challenging to generate positive project results, we have to admit that every team still has to overcome the same obstacles. Henning Brandt and Daniel Pal , Enterprise Solutions Engineers from GmbH share their experience from the field, with information they wished they had from the start.

When? Wednesday, Oct 03, 11:30 a.m. – 12:15 p.m.

Splunking Crime: Predicting London Crime Rates Using Machine Learning Toolkit

Police forces across the globe are using big data prediction software to try to pinpoint where the next crime could be committed. Shashank Raina and Paul McDonough from NCC Group want to show you how it’s done, by taking the crime statistics of the past few years, which are readily available on the net and using Splunk, create models around it. They’ll share how this model can help find the relationship between crimes and the number of police stations, tourist attractions, shops, and so forth.

When? Wednesday, Oct 03, 2:00 p.m. – 2:20 p.m.

NextGen IT Ops – a Telco’s Journey to Service Intelligence From Legacy and Siloed Event Management Systems

What do you do when you’re stuck in the Dark Ages supporting 30-plus-year-old technology with monitoring teams using the same outdated tools for more than a decade? How do you combine network metrics and exceptions or failures into meaningful data for your operations teams without overloading them with information? Alexander Romanauskas , Solutions Architect at CCI has the answer. He’ll explain how his company got there, and how you can get there, too.

When? Wednesday, Oct 03, 11:30 a.m. – 12:15 p.m.

What Is Your DevOps Team Actually Doing?

You know your DevOps team is monitoring and managing the product, but what does it really mean? To check on the health of your processes you need to be dialed into your source code, artifact management, continuous integration, delivery and deployment, static code analysis, security analysis, monitoring health, infrastructure and test automation, and so on. Brandon Cipes and Justin Evans from cPrime wants to show you how you can aggregate your view of the DevOps world in practice.

When? Thursday, Oct 04, 12:15 p.m. – 1:00 p.m.

There’s One More Thing…

The third day of Splunk .conf 18 starts with a keynote from Silicon Valley icon and philanthropist, Steve Wozniak . It’s not an ordinary keynote – This is your chance to ask him anything you ever wanted, in a lively Q&A that will include questions from the attendees. You don’t want to miss it.

When? Thursday, Oct 4, 09:00 am – 10:00 am, ESPN Arena

See you there?

We hope you have a great time at the conference, we know we’re going to have a blast. Want to share your thoughts or insights on the upcoming sessions? Send us your comment or tweet at us @overopshq .