Guest blog by Wendi O'Neill, Splunk Platform Leader, Sirius Computer Solutions.  Follow Wendi on: Twitter  @WendiONeill9; or Linked in:https://www.linkedin.com/in/wendioneill.

Do you ever wish you could gather up ALL your machine data, lock it in a room, and grill it for answers until you find all the faults in your IT infrastructure? Come on Big Data, I want to identify your problems, get answers, and find new business insights. Is that too much to ask?

Most IT management tools today are silo-based -locked in different departments and not designed to interact. To get real value out of machine data and leverage its power, data needs to make connections and correlations so you can use it for insight and visibility to see exactly what is going on, where it is happening and why. If only I could find a solution that could help me see....

Have you heard of Splunk?

I would like to introduce you to the power of Splunk. At its core, Splunk does three fundamental things really well:

• It collects data from anywhere by using powerful universal forwarding and indexing technology.
• It searches and analyzes everything across all your data using powerful search algorithms and schema-on-the-fly (aka ask any question any time) technology.
• And finally, Splunk very quickly delivers real-time insight from your machine data so you can get it into the hands of your IT and Business people.

Why should you care that Splunk can collect data from anywhere?

With today's technology, literally everywhere you look, you can see some type of machine generating data. From the Fitbit on your wrist, to the construction equipment out your window, to the more traditional laptop on your desk, data is being generated every nanosecond. It is mind boggling to imaging the amount of data generation, let alone getting access to that data so you can gain meaningful insight. And Splunk gives you access to collect that data if you want it. Why would you want it? So you can get meaning out of it to do your job better, get better performance, resolve problems better, and run your business better.

Why should you care that Splunk can search and analyze everything?

Once you've collected that data, aren't you just itching to ask it questions? Questions like: Where is the slow up? Where is the fault? Why am I getting that error? Why is this system, database or app not working as I expected? Why am I getting so many support calls? Why do I have 1,000 dumped shopping carts in the last hour? Why is there a major spike in my network activity? Why is John's iPad logging in to our systems from China when I see him sitting across the aisle from me?

You can ask those questions of Splunk, either predefined or on-the-fly. This means you can get notifications of hundreds of known anomaly types and take or automate corrective actions. But if something unexpected happens, you can also ask new questions on-the-fly to find a resolution and solve a problem. Because wouldn't we all like to know why John's iPad is logging in from China while we're in the same room?

Why should you care that Splunk can deliver real time business insight?

Delivering real time business insight translates into real time business dollars. Really. If you understand that 1,000 shopping carts were dumped in the last hour due to a break caused by a very small code tweak, then identifying the problem and fixing it within minutes - instead of hours - translates into real business value and real business dollars.

Business insight comes when you have different people asking different questions of the SAME data. The IT department, application owners, compliance and security owners and line of business can all access the same data, but have very different interests and questions they want to pose to data based on their role and need.

Want to know more?

Sirius provides complete business and data center solutions to help companies of all sizes reduce IT costs and complexity, improve service levels for their internal and external clients, and minimize risk and downtime across the entire data center. And Splunk offers solutions that help us do our job for you.

Sirius and Cisco are offering a complimentary, live webinar that can help you learn more:

On June 16 from 1-2p.m. CT. During this webinar, we demonstrate how organizations like yours are making a slam dunk by leveraging Cisco Unified Computing Systems (UCS) and Splunk software to increase the performance of their applications and infrastructure.

We will demonstrate how Splunk and Cisco solutions combine to deliver powerful analytics, comprehensive single-pane visibility, and outstanding scalability and performance. And we will discuss:

• Best practices for building a performance analytics platform
• How to scale your infrastructure, ensure uptime, and maintain availability for mission-critical environments
• How to easily tune and optimize end-to-end big data and analytics infrastructures

Join us and learn how Sirius is helping clients leverage Cisco UCS and Splunk software solutions to reduce risk, accelerate time-to-market, monitor Web platforms and application stacks, and rapidly troubleshoot and proactively prevent issues.

To register, CLICK HERE