At Splunkbase we are constantly striving to improve the experience for our users – whether it’s the app-discovery process for a Splunk admin/user, or the app-submission and management experience for our developers. We’ve been busy making changes over the last few months, and I thought this would be a good time to cover some of the more important changes we’ve made recently.

There was a lot of backend engineering work done to spruce up the infrastructure, the API, and search results relevancy – changes that are not always apparent to an end-user of Splunkbase. However, in this post I will talk about some user-facing features we recently added with the goal of improving the experience for our developer community. These features will allow you to better position your app on Splunkbase, as well as understand its adoption by the Splunk community.

Youtube Video Support

We launched a survey at .Conf 2015 that (among other questions) asked Splunk users & developers about the relevance of video content to understand an app’s functionality. Based on the feedback and interest from the community we have now added the ability to provide a link to a youtube video as part of an app.

This will allow:

1. Developers, to better explain the features and functionality of their app through richer content
2. Splunk admins and users, to better understand an app and the functionality it provides before they download and install the app

To ensure a good experience for our users the video content will be:

1. Tested – to make sure it is a valid youtube video, and
2. Curated – to ensure that
   • It is appropriate – similar to curation we already do for screenshots
   • It does not include any advertisements – so our users don’t have to go through advertisements before they can get to the actual content

We have also updated our content submission guidelines to cover video content. This provides guidance on what is considered appropriate content.

What this means for you!

With this change now you – an app developer – can add a youtube video to your app. You can do this by going to “Manage App” –> “Media” section for your app, and adding the ID for your youtube video. This will allow you to better market your app to prospective users.

Try out this new feature and let us know what you think, or how we can improve this experience!

Here is a screenshot of the Machine Learning App that recently added a video to explain the functionality:

Github Flavored Markdown

Until recently, the markdown that you could use in the documentation section for an app was very basic, supporting the original Markdown language. This kind of worked…until it didn’t, or was not sufficient. The basic markdown does not even support tables – and fairly limits what you can do with documentation – this is what spurred the discussion and a need to update this functionality. However, we took this further – rather than adding just the capability to support tables, we switched to using Github Flavored Markdown. It’s popular in the developer community, and is a lot more powerful than basic Markdown!

Here’s a screenshot of an app using the updated markdown capability and tables:

Application Analytics (and custom time range!)

App developers have had the ability to view analytics on their apps for some time now. You can click on “View Analytics” in your app’s administration section to access these analytics for your app. This includes downloads, and active installations for the app.

The early release of this feature had this functionality limited to the last 30 days of analytics for an app. While useful, this did not provide you a picture of how the downloads and installs are trending over a longer time horizon. We recently enhanced this view to allow you to view this data over presets of last month, last six months, or provide a custom time range to view analytics over any time range.

We hope these features make your life better as a Splunk App Developer! Look out for more updates in the future with features targeted at developers as well as Splunk admins and users.

Have suggestions to improve Splunkbase – please reach out to us at splunkbase-admin@splunk.com