Introducing Splunk
Long before Docker's rise in popularity, Splunk was established in 2003 to help companies discover some patterns and information from the bulk of data provided by the growing number of applications and services in their environments. Splunk is a software application that allows you to gather your logs and data from your applications and hardware systems. It then lets you analyze and visualize the data you have collected, usually in one central location.
Splunk allows you to enter your data in different formats, and in a lot of situations, Splunk will be able to recognize the data format it is in. You can then use this data to help troubleshoot your applications, create monitoring dashboards, and create alerts on specific events when they occur.
Note
In this chapter, we'll only be touching the surface of what Splunk can do, but if you're interested, there are a lot of valuable resources that will show you how to gain operational intelligence...
