ANTenna Blog -- Business & E-Business

How often are you peppered with questions like this from your company's accounting department: "What happened to such-and-such transaction? Why didn't it go through?" Or maybe you find yourself spending hour after hour troubleshooting security, network, or compliance issues. If only there was a better, faster way to search your company's data -- a search engine, say. Just for IT data.

Splunk, a San Francisco-based company that just announced it has raised another $25 million in funding, has one. Its free Splunk license allows small and midsize businesses to index up to 500 MB/day. Here's how the company describes its search tool:

"Splunk is the IT Search engine that indexes and lets you search, navigate, alert and report on IT data from any application, server or network device. Securely access logs, configurations, scripts and code, message, traps and alerts, activity reports, stack traces and metrics across thousands of components, from one place, all in real time," says the company's Web site.

One of Splunk's customers is FreshDirect, an online grocer serving NY and New Jersey. FreshDirect's Manager of Systems Engineering and his team of three administrators "used to spend a large proportion of their time logging in to one host after another looking for the source of site problems as well as capturing data for developers who didn't have the ability to access locked-down production systems themselves." According to the case study on Splunk's Web site, FreshDirect now reports

• 90% reduction in application server error isolation time


• Faster settlement error correction improves cash flow


• 4-5 hours/week of system admin time eliminated by providing direct developer access to production data

While you're checking out Splunk, take a look at Project Wishbone, a competitor, which hopes to tap into the "$10B+ IT management market and the rapid adoption by companies large and small of on-demand services and SaaS."