Consist: Splunk expertise on the national and international stage

Kiel – The broad scope of the data analytics platform Splunk is evident not only in the different projects that Consist executes for its customers, but also in the range of events at which the company presents its Splunk expertise.

Regarding the aspect of IT security, the highlight of 2019 was undoubtedly the competition "Boss of the SOC" (BOTS) at the ".conf", the world's largest specialist conference for Splunk. In the BOTS competition, security experts from all over the world compete against each other to process and solve challenging threat scenarios with the help of Splunk. The competition organizers had previously not only attended numerous international security conferences, but also compiled a gigantic dataset from Windows Endpoint, Server and cloud data, which was supplemented by a completely new industrial cyber security scenario (ICS/SCADA) in 2019. A Consist team also participated once again in Las Vegas and was among the winners, as in previous years.

During the four days of .conf in October, a total of 11,000 visitors exchanged insights on Splunk, accompanied by 400 specialist presentations and technical sessions. For the fourth time already, a Senior Consultant from Consist was invited as a speaker. Martin Müller has been a member of the SplunkTrust expert group for several years, and once again delighted the audience in his session on the topic of fields and indexed tokens.

In a completely different focus area, but with an equally impressive Big Data context, Consist hosted the Hacking Night on November 14, 2019. In the framework of the interdisciplinary weeks (IDW) at Kiel University of Applied Sciences (FH Kiel), students were able to test using Splunk for the preparation and analysis of large volumes of data, through specific tasks. Based on the game Minecraft, participants had to create their own designs, gather resources and process server data in real time. For this purpose, several Splunk consultants from Consist created a data scenario linked to various tasks for teams to solve in the competition.

According to the Wikipedia definition of Minecraft, players can "discover and extract raw materials" (mine), and use them to "craft a wide variety of items", which initially sounds quite manageable. The fascination of this sandbox game for 112 million players worldwide arises from the virtually endless data volume - up to 60 million blocks can be processed, and an almost unlimited number in the Java edition - plus the associated design options in a 3D world. Combined with the resulting server data, the students had plenty of work to do from 7pm until 7am the following morning. The Big Data Night was held for the third time under the umbrella of the IDW, which takes place again next year from April 27 to May 8, 2020.

A no less exciting dataset, but this time taken from real life, is provided by Consist’s Splunk workshop series. Since the beginning of 2019, IT professionals without any prior knowledge can test the performance of Splunk, with special emphasis on IT security also available from November this year onwards. The formats "Splunk4Rookies" and "Security4Rookies" will also be continued in 2020, supplemented by the “DeepDive” advanced workshop.

Even though they hardly have any time available due to the many Splunk projects for customers, it is important to the Consist consultants that the positive resonance from 2019 is carried forward into the workshops, sessions and another hackathon in 2020. The challenging abundance of data for this will certainly not decrease in future.