The first DevSummit event was recently hosted by Kaufland with 200 people attending for the day to hear presentations about the “World of API”, discuss the latest best practice developments and build ideas in a hackathon. One highlight was the keynote from Markus Andrezak on how technology, business and innovation play together.
Of course, a team of Splunkers (big thanks to my colleagues Mark and Henning) wouldn’t miss such an event and got involved with a booth as well as a presentation. It was amazing to have so many fruitful discussions about how to make data more easily accessible and useable for business, development and operation teams. In the morning Joern Wanke from the Kaufland Omnichannel team presented on how his team gains business insights by monitoring their online shop with Splunk to analyze trends in product usage. Using Splunk’s pattern detection he showed how fast and easy it is to find error patterns in custom application logs and accelerate their development.
In the afternoon I had the chance to give a talk about DevOps and how Splunk can help in this area. Organizations with complex technology stacks often lack visibility across their full product development lifecycle. But visibility is crucial for fast, high quality product development and to achieve a fast to time market. So DevOps is under pressure to increase velocity and agility to support that goal. Often bugs and issues are not found until the next release goes into production. So how can Splunk help in this situation?
With Splunk we can abstract from all contributing systems and development steps by collecting and analyzing the data provided. Task tracking, code repo changes, results of continuous integration and build service systems, test automation and quality assurance, testing, staging, finally deployment and productive operations – all these moving parts can be analyzed and monitored in real time. This means all contributing teams have a unified view and the ability to make data driven decisions regarding their daily work. Don’t forget that they can also save a lot of time when it comes to finding and fixing errors, because development and operations has all the data easily accessible. The development team can also get insights from production logs – without touching critical systems. Finally it’s also worth mentioning that all teams can get proactive alerting about issues and easily integrate them with their collaborative environments, for example by utilizing custom alert actions or leverage DevOps related apps and add-ons from splunkbase. More details can be found in the presentation slides:
In conclusion it was a great day with so many good conversations around new use cases to be discovered with Splunk. We’re excited to see how ideas thrive over the coming year and how Kaufland take it to the next level with DevSummit 2017. To learn more visit Splunk for DevOps and also check the Splunk Developer Portal.