Splunk IT search engine partners with Unixpac

The company has already sold its software directly to Telstra, Monash University in Victoria and MacQuaries Bank.

The software is free to use as a downloadable service that indexes IT infrastructure which means being able to navigate data from any application, server or network device in real time.

It includes logs, configurations, messages, traps, alerts, scripts and metrics.

Robert Lau, vice president, Splunk APAC and Japan describes the tool as ‘the Google for the data centre’. He claims rather than take 14 days to solve a network error, Splunk can source the problem in two minutes.

“We started selling the software as a commercial product which people can download for free and we have over 800 enterprise users worldwide,” said Lau.

“We have been talking to Unixpac about whether it thinks there is a market for splunk in Australia.

“We believe our product is self explanatory and we need to find a good channel partner to help us. We have been working with Unixpac for five months now and we are working together to develop new ideas and solve problems,” Lau added.

According to Tom Piotrowski, managing director of Unixpac, the company wants to introduce the software to its resellers.

“The product has a lot of followers even though many people are not aware that a tool like this exists. This is a fantastic opportunity for channel partners and system integrators to get involved.” said Piotrowski.

Joshua Edmonds systems administrator and programmer from Monash University Shared Systems Information Technology Services in Victoria, Australia started using Splunk at the beginning of this year.

“We use Splunk as an extension of our central systems log. It consolidates all the logs from 600 servers that we look after into one central point. We use it to index all the data and track back to different points over time. It helps us to fault find and get right to a problem quickly. We initially tried it as a free trial to see how it performs,” said Edmonds.

“It is beneficial to us in that it cuts down the time when something goes wrong in our infrastructure by finding out what caused it quickly.”