 Live from the Walt Disney World Swan and Dolphin Resort in Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering Splunk.com 2016, brought to you by Splunk. Now, here are your hosts, John Furrier and John Walls. And welcome back to Orlando here. We continue on theCUBE, our coverage of Splunk.com 2016. Again, live from Orlando, show floor. A lot of activity going on here as we continue our streaming coverage. And along with John Furrier, I'm John Walls. And we're joined by a couple of gentlemen who are intimately involved with Splunk Trust as we've been talking about. Great community. Users and customers and partners helping each other is what it boils down to. Rich Mullerwein and David Spritz gentlemen, thanks for joining us. Good to have you both with us here on theCUBE. And Rich, if you would, you've got the Emmy here in front of you. You've got some hardware that you're taking home for your work here at the conference. I do. Part of the community and everything that's going on with it is also includes documentation feedback. So as we go through the documentation for the Splunk product itself, at the bottom of every one of those pages is a feedback form. And apparently I give really great documentation. So Chris Gales, who runs the documentation team gave me a trophy as the feedback team. What was it for the feedback? Yeah, what was it? What brutal feedback? No, most people would just say it. No, they like the brutal feedback too. They do. It's amazing. I don't know why. But what did you say? What was it about? They're not afraid of feedback. They want feedback. They do. They love feedback, both positive and negative. But yeah, this worked great for me, but this one step, the syntax was wrong or whatever. You just point that out, tell them what I was trying to do, what they got right, what maybe could be improved slightly. Every now and then I just send them back like I went through a whole piece of documentation on building a cluster and it was perfect. So I sent them feedback and said, thank you, this was perfect. Did everything I needed. Oh, that's sweet and simple. So what's Splunk Trust all about? If you explain kind of the DNA or the fabric of it to someone on the outside looking in, how would you describe the kind of work you do, the community you've built and that dialogue that goes on amongst its members? Sure, so I think that the best way that I've heard it put, which is by our fearless leader, Rachel, was that the Splunk Trust members may not always be the smartest person in the room, but they're going to be the most helpful person in the room. So these are the people who are part of the community, who have been part of the community for a while, in some cases, in some cases, they're newer to the community. They either have, they might have a lot of knowledge on Splunk, they may have a little knowledge on Splunk, but at the same time, they're always willing to help other people to help them get their questions answered, to get the data in that they need to get in, et cetera. You know, we've been covering the dot-com from the beginning since the Cube is on a seventh year. So we've had the luxury of kind of watching the coolness of Splunk at all the levels. I mean, it's been a great success around the business side of course, but the community is really awesome and you mentioned helpful, smartest person in the room. These are potentially important to understand. I want to get your thoughts on it. The ethos of Splunk is not to be the smartest person in the room, because everyone's smart, because that breeds arrogance and some communities fall down with, I'm the smartest person in the room, someone sucks all the oxygen out of the room, troll whatever people want to call it, versus having a swagger but helpful. Discuss the decision because I think it's important to highlight that. So I think the important part there is that when people first come into any type of a chat room, let's say, especially if you're used to old-school IRC or if you're in newer Slack channel that we have now as well, people are used to traditionally when you come into a situation like that and you ask a question that might be really elementary. People are like, oh, you're a new, go away. We don't want to be bothered with that. The Splunk community is completely different. Unlike any other community that I've ever seen where everyone wants to help. Everyone is excited and loves this product and they want everyone else to be excited and love this product as well. And so they help. And so they'll help with the simple questions, with the hard questions, with the bugs, everything that everyone needs help with. And sometimes it's as simple as, I'm usually in IRC very early in the mornings, even according to the East Coast people. So sometimes folks will hop on there and ask a question, and especially a year or two ago, I didn't know most of the answers and I'd just say, well, I don't know the answers, but you know what, if you hang on, we can chat off and on for a little bit. And at some point, the West Coasters will come in or these people will come in and they'll be able to help you. But just that friendly face of like, oh, somebody logged in and they can't get their answer done, but somebody's there saying, hey, just hang on a little bit. Somebody will be with you. We are community supported, but somebody will help. How important is the community to Splunk? Can you share your thoughts? What does Splunk do as a company that's different? Because everyone wants to win the community. Like it's winnable. You don't really win people, right? I mean, you win them over of a period of time, but I kind of hate that phrase anyway. We're going to win the developers. We're going to win the community. It's just not that easy. What does Splunk do that makes their community so robust? Is it a mutual trust thing? They provide tools? What are some of the things that they do? So I think it's actually a combination. So I think it's a matter of the people that kind of help run the community, like Rachel, for example. She's fantastic. And it's also the fact that Splunk understands that this community is important for the product. It's a place they can get feedback, where they can test things out, where they can say, hey, we're thinking about this new feature. Is this something? Okay, it is something good. Let's talk about that then. I think Splunk's willingness to put trust in its community, especially with things like answers. Answers is a huge success as far as I'm concerned. In terms of how quickly different questions when they're answered get answers. The quality of those answers is usually pretty outstanding. I think answers is probably one of the key aspects. It's not a boring community for sure. I mean, obviously the product's been successful. There's new people coming in at all levels of the product mix, but they're also doing new cool stuff. I mean, like Cyber, we were talking before we came on about that growth here. So there's always this learning environment going on. Can you share the things that you think are hot right now that people are most focused on in terms of the conversations and the learnings? Right now, I think that most folks who are getting into Splunk seem to always have their eyes somewhere along the line on either the security end of things or on the IT services part. So there's a lot of new products they've come out with in the last year or two that are just really exciting. They're really nice looking. And then they find out, oh, and it's easy to use. And there's a great community helping to support it. And the company appreciates its users and customers and gives them trophies. So there's a variety of kind of different use cases that people are coming to, but that is the common themes I'm seeing. Quite a bit of. Would you defer? I know, I think that's completely true. Yeah, I agree with everything you said. I think security and services right now are those are the big focuses for a lot of our users who are coming in and talking in the community. Looking at things like different security use cases, yes, there are, yes, as well as ITSI. True or false statement. Splunkers in the community like to have a good time. Oh, that's definitely true. I think that's true. 100% true. We're up here wearing fesses, I think that kind of speaks to it. Kate. Yeah, it's definitely a trick question. I mean, I'm a blown away by, but they're not slackers either. You're smart people there. They work hard, play hard kind of mindset and like to have a good time and let loose, but also very active in the sessions. I mean, I look at the sessions here. Two things jump out at me at the show here for the folks watching who aren't here. After the keynotes, the hallway is packed like salmon swimming, you know, down the river and you're kind of trying to go through it. It's packed. The hallways are wall to wall people and the sessions are well attended. One, that's an indicator of interest. Oh yeah. The party also is good too. So normally, you don't see that. I mean, it's kind of a culture, right? No, that's completely true. The small community loves to participate. And you're right, no slackers amongst us. We like to participate. We're on there all day. We're doing it while we're doing other things. Making dinner, sitting in chat rooms at the same time. That kind of stuff. So how about the old school, new school dynamic? Because I was talking with John earlier and we had Rahm on from one of the investments I just did on the threat detection. He's an old school guy in multiple ventures, multiple exits, but you're starting to see a real mix of systems guys and guys who have been around IT and systems. You know, when you talk about IRC old days, when I was back then, it was just through us, right? But now you have the old school mindset and a ton of new in migration of new young people. What's it like? And what's the dynamic of that? I mean, you mentioned, obviously, you guys are really well accepting, but what are the new kids in the block doing, right? I mean, they must bring some energy and some new techniques to the table. Can you share any cutting edge things that you've observed? Anecdotes? Are they wise asses? Are they punks? I mean, it's not all get off my mind. You know, I mean, come on. An old man says, you know. I love seeing new people show up into the channels or on answers and stuff, and sometimes they come up with the most amazing solutions, too, because they approach things from a totally different angle. So I really like the new blood. And the other thing I really like about the Splunk community is that in general, I think it's like the smartest group of people I know. It's like there aren't any slackers in there. Even the new people may not know much about Splunk yet, but gosh, they can come up with some good things because they know all kinds of other stuff. We're a fairly mature, well, in some ways, anyway, a fairly mature group of people, but it's certainly a very smart group of people. We meant to have a group of people. I hear him out there a lot. You guys are gonna get good applause out there. You guys are rock stars. So, you know, it's the old, there's no such thing as a dumb question, right? Right. But for some people, it's hard to raise your hand and say, I've got a problem here. That's very true. So, number one, if I'm watching this and I'd like to become involved or I might, how do I do that? How do I try, how do I engage? And then secondly, can you give us an example of maybe welcoming in somebody new to the community and solving a direct problem because of that group thought or that group speak, if you will? Sure, so in terms of getting into the community, it's pretty easy. We have a few different chat methods that you can use. So, for the old school folks, there's IRC, for the new school folks, there's Slack. There's also answers. It's a terrific place to go and ask questions. It's actively patrolled and monitored in terms of making sure it's moderated and everyone's being friendly. And I think it's one of the great things about the community as well is that it's kind of self-policed. So I mean, what's the URL? What's the... So that's answers.splunk.com. Okay, good, all right. And then for the Slack chat, if you'd like access to that, you can go to squunkforward2.com slash chat. Yep, there's a little form to fill out with your email address and... And what have you done for solving? How does it work? How does that exchange happen? How's the dialogue transpire? I mean, walk us through that to somebody again who's watching, say, okay, this is what I can expect. Depends on the medium. So if you're on IRC or on Slack, usually you pop in and you'll ask a quick question. And it can take a few minutes for somebody who's paying attention to actually notice that or whatnot. And they'll start, it's a back and forth there because it's a very interactive thing. So they'll say, oh, what were you expecting to see? Because that would do this, right? And it's like, oh, I know what I wanted was this. And so they'd start explaining it and we'd start digging deeper and then we'd end up, we'd find out how to fix it most of the time. We can usually fix it or at least get them pointed the right direction. Sometimes we'll dig out answers actually from the actual forums where there's a more long, lengthier involved answer to that particular problem. Sometimes we'll start answering questions and then an answer will come in for the answer and then we'll start giving to a separate chat about inside the answers actually, about like the various solutions. We'll always try to at least circle that back and make sure there's an easy, as easy as possible solution to that problem. I got to ask the question. So maybe two sides that you can pick your side you want to go to. Coolest thing you've worked on or seen or the weirdest use case of Splunk that you've seen? Man, what's the favorite thing that I've worked with smart meters? Actually, because it's really interesting data in terms of pulling in data from across an entire power grid and looking at information and seeing what you can do with it. I think the most interesting thing I've seen is some of the ways people will bend stream stats. There's one command that is useful in so many weird cases that you'd never think it'd apply there. And just seeing that there were ways that that gets put into play sometimes. Were the stream stats command? Yes, the stream stats command. It's just, it's an interesting one. Sorry, I'm a little... And okay, VI versus Emacs. Where do we stand on that? Oh, VI. VI. Okay, and the new kids, what are they doing? I don't know. VI probably. They're probably using supply and pass. Are they? Okay. No pad plus plus for Windows. No plus plus for Windows. No users for Windows. Yep. VI just got an update in the 25 years or 35 years or so. I think controversy. Of course I'm a VI guy myself. Did Emacs hate it? But that's me. There is Splunk syntax highlighting available. Yes. Well, before we let you go, I do want to point out that you both avoided answering, what's the weirdest? You both avoided that. I'd like to at least give it a shot if you can. Depends what weird is. Well, yeah, I mean, without, you know, this is a family show kind of. Oh, okay. Kind of. We'll keep the glasses away. Let's see. PG-13 is okay. Yeah. Maybe R. Let's see. Number one. I don't. I actually have a comment about that though. Oh, sure. There is, it's such a flexible product. It's put to so many different kinds of uses that to pick out one or two or even three really weird things is really hard because some, there's a whole, there's a whole tier of the weird uses of Splunk. Doing random things and Splunking games and Minecraft. It's really the beauties in the eye of the beholder with Splunk. It is. What they do with it is what they want. It's not about a general purpose tool. It's not a hammer looking for a nail. Or you know what I'm saying? It's different. Any same answer you're going to take a tap out on these two? So I think the thing is, just about anyone can do anything with Splunk. The community can be a great help in making that happen and helping the machines. Someone's going to Splunk the stats of the cube and do a little metadata grab on the end of the hour. Oh, I'm sure they are. I'm sure they are. We need a weird trophy for next year. There we go. Because then we'll have a competition. Well, I would have said, put this on up. Then we'll go. We'll get to work on that. Depends what weird is. Right. All right. Gentlemen, thanks for being here. Weirdness is weird, though. And again, and I'm sure on behalf of the community, thank you for the work. Fez, well-deserved and good luck down the road. Thank you for having me. Great community, guys. Really, if you'd be proud to be a part of this. Thanks for being here. Once in a lifetime, these communities develop like this. Cool, good. All right, back with more here from .conf 2016. Live on theCUBE in Orlando, right after this.