Splunk, from a strategic perspective, starts with the understanding that as you use and develop Splunk technology within your organization, the knowledge and experience you and your co-workers acquire and/or advance are represented as knowledge or knowledge objects.

Splunk is a commanding search and analysis tool that helps organizations see both the details and the big picture (in the way of patterns) in the available data. Using Splunk, you are not just scanning log entries, but you also have the ability to leverage the insights that the data holds to find out more about the past, present, and future.

Throughout this book, we explained how Splunk automatically extracts knowledge from (most) any kind of data—events, fields, timestamps, and more—to help you harness the information in a better, smarter, and more concentrated way (some data is extracted at index time, as Splunk indexes data, while the majority comes at search time).

Different from mainstream or...