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If you haven’t yet been introduced to Splunk Answers, you’d better go and see what all the fuss is about. We started Answers to provide a fast, efficient medium for users to ask questions and get answers, and it has been a raging success. It empowers our users to help each other out on common – and some not-so-common – obstacles to success.

The Splunk Answers juggernaut is racing past milestones. We launched Answers in early April to little fanfare. In June we reached the 1,000 question milestone. And in late July we reached the 2,000 question milestone. And on August 18, 2010, Splunk Answers surpassed 1,000 users. We had no idea when we started Answers that it would catch on this rapidly. Just two weeks ago we reached 800 users, and usage has spiked since then. I wish I could say we had to make a special effort for Splunk Answers to reach the heights it has, but the truth is that it has caught on organically with our users who found it very useful to get quick answers to their questions. Fancy that.

Splunk Answers Screenshot

Top Community Users

While we’re at it, I’d like to take a moment and single out our top community contributors on Splunk Answers.

Special mention goes to Lowell (from Martin’s Famous Pastry Shoppe), ftk (from CallMiner), and muebel (from Netsmart), who all attended our glorious users’ conference – it was great meeting you in person.

There’s an embarrassment of riches when it comes to the quality of sessions we have lined up for the first-ever Splunk Worldwide Users’ Conference. We have 16 (count ‘em!) *16* customer-led sessions. Having been involved with many trade shows and conferences, my experience tells me that getting customers on the record about anything is a daunting task. Not so at Splunk – our customers are quite enthusiastic about participating, as you’ll see next week. All of these sessions are great, and I wanted to call out a couple that you won’t want to miss.

What: “Managing an Enterprise Deployment: Lessons Learned”
Who: Allan Burnett, VMware
When: Tuesday, August 10, 11:15 am

What: “Heroku and Splunk”
Who: Oren Teich, Heroku
When: Tuesday, August 10, 2:45 pm

What: “Keeping Developers Happy: Secure Access to Production Logs for Rapid Troubleshooting”
Who: Nancy Cunningham, LogicalExtremes
When: Wednesday, August 11, 9:15 am

There’s still time, so take a moment and register now.

Brothers and sisters of the Splunk persuasion, I present to you the Splunk App-of-the-month contest!

*Applause*

This is not your hipster’s app contest – this is a contest about Getting. Stuff. Done.

*Applause*

This is a contest about taking all the cool stuff you already do with Splunk, and showing it off for the world to see! On Splunkbase!

*Applause*

This is a contest about rewarding those who create the coolest, most useful apps on Splunk – and everyone’s a winner!

*Applause*

So come one, come all, package your field extractions, views, dashboards, scripted inputs, and other Splunk mods into apps or add-ons for Splunkbaaaaaaaase! Contest begins on August 1 – enter as often as you wish!

I was going to write up a big post about how awesome it was to be pilloried by all the attendees of Cisco Live – to the tune of 1,000 people coming by our booth to learn more about Splunk. But then I thought, why not just show it in action? Worth a thousand words – one per booth visitor:

Cisco Live attendees line up for Splunk booth

(this was initially posted on the blog On CollabNet)

I recently had the pleasure of attending the Evans Data Developer Relations Conference in San Jose, and it gave me the opportunity to listen to 2 very contrasting approaches to what amounted to the same thing: university outreach. On one side was Jean Elliott, discussing how Sun was going to approach (reach? eclipse? fall just short of?) 900,000 university program members by this summer. In that session, she discussed the various ways Sun had put themselves in that position – it was a tour de force of grassroots outreach featuring open source communities that target life-long academics and students. On the other side was Bruce Carney from Nokia, who delved into a myriad of metrics and measurables in an attempt to define success and track how far along they were towards reaching it. During this session, an inch-thick booklet of tiny font statistics was passed around the room.

It was grassroots outreach vs. statistical analysis. Really, it was inspiration vs. perspiration. Of course, this is not to say that Sun doesn’t expend significant energy planning these programs and measuring their success, or that Nokia doesn’t engage at a grassroots level, but it was clear which parts each company emphasized, and I started to think about the role of inspiration in online communities.

It comes down to the age-old question, “Why does anyone participate in your community?” There’s nothing to force someone to come to any community or make them stick around. Ultimately, someone sticks around because it’s in their own self-interest to do so, but there’s something “squishy” about how community members self-select, and I can’t honestly say that it’s 100% about the product or technology that forms the basis of the community. In fact, I’m pretty sure that in addition to a community’s core offering, there’s an element of culture or “soft” product, if you will. If you run a community and want to engage with your community, how much have you invested in your soft product?

This post introduces the series, which I’ll continue for a few days. Tomorrow, I’ll continue with a post about “zen and the art of community development” – it’s about the engagement, not the direct ROI. It’s about the conversation, not simply providing an answer.

reminder: Subversion Community Day at SCALE is coming up: http://svn-summit.open.collab.net/ #scale7x !scale7x

reminder: OpenSource World CFP is now open! http://tinyurl.com/9byplt

It must be said that one of the most pernicious trends in government has been the resolute path toward libertarian ideology with the desire for a laissez faire utopia trumping all pragmatism and good sense. We’ve tried this deregulation experiment a few times now with mostly disastrous results: 1. California energy deregulation and 2. US banking deregulation. One would think that libertarian ideologues would at some point need to present actual evidence that their deregulation fantasies can come to fruition. As yet, none exists. Can we now agree that the natural result of market deregulation is almost necessarily graft, corruption and crony capitalism? As with peace activists and pacifists, libertarianism is too naive and dependent on the goodness of other humans.

Take a survey of the world’s industrialized economies, both now and since the beginning of industrialization. One would be hard pressed to find just one that fit the model of a libertarian’s ideal state. That’s because such a state doesn’t occur in nature. Just as the middle class does not naturally occur without the assistance of a strong central government (and progressive taxes, natch), so too is a well-oiled, corruption-free, strong capitalist economy accompanied by a government that intervenes on behalf of its constituents, balancing the needs of all parties such that one cannot completely dominate all the others. This is not the same as mandating income equality, which is a pointless exercise, but rather a system of checks and balances to ensure that hard work does not go unrewarded.

Let us now enjoy our new foray into Socialist Democracy.