Continuing on with my goal for 2013 of writing more blog posts I figured I’d go back and look at a neat use I found for Splunk and two kinds of data I was able to ingest in to it.

As Splunk has grown in popularity over the last year I started see more and more blog posts, twitter comments, etc regarding various uses for Splunk and most of the time I look over at my own dashboards and see items I’ve had in place for a long time being described.

Recently I came across a blog post from early January on Splunk’s own blog site entitle “Making Applied Math Interesting” which does a good job detailing how to use Splunk to examine time series temperature data. Reading this is made me initially think of a report I wrote that does exactly that but then added another layer of data….the human element.

I think my tweet from almost a year ago now pretty simply sums it up:

And here’s a better close up on the chart itself…

If you still haven’t figured it out… Two data sources come in to play here:

1. 1. Temperature and Humidity data from the Air Control units in the server room
   2. Physical Badge event data

Now combine the data and chart it and you can see if there’s any correlation between the human element in the server room and the temperature/humidity of the server room. Although there’s not a drastic effect of the number of personnel coming and going in the server room, you can see a big spike in the number of entries to the server room on or around March 13th does correlate with a 10% increase in the amount of humidity reported in the room.

Obviously there’s many other uses for this data and a number of reports that can be pulled out but for now I thought I’d share this.

Cheers.