The importance of making credible decisions can be the difference between profit or loss, or even survival or extinction.
Decision Support Systems (or DSSs) serve the key decision makers of an organization– helping them to effectively assess predictors (which can be rapidly changing and not easily specified in advance) and make the best decisions, reducing risk.
The advantages of successfully implemented decision support systems are many, and include:
- Saving time and increasing productivity
- Improving efficiency
- Boosting communications
- Reducing costs
- Supporting learning
- Enhancing control
- Identifying and understanding trends and/or patterns
- Gaining operational intelligence (OI)
- Gauging results of services by channel or demographic
- Reconciling fees against actual use
- Finding the heaviest users (or abusers)
- And more…
SPLUNK as the DSS
Can Splunk be considered a true real-time decision support system? The answer is of course, “Yes!”
Splunk does this by providing features and functionalities that provide the ability to:
- answer questions based upon both structured and unstructured data,
- support managers at all levels (as well as individuals and groups),
- be adaptable, flexible, interactive and easy to learn and use,
- provide efficient and quick responses,
- allow scheduled-control of developed processes,
- support easy development by all levels of end users,
- provide universal access to all types of data,
- offer both standalone and web-based integrations,
- connect real-time service data with details about that data collected in an organizations master or other data and
- More…
Splunk the Product
Splunk runs from both a standard command line or an interface that is totally web-based (which means that no thick client application needs to be installed) and performs large-scale, high-speed indexing on both historical and real-time data.
To index, Splunk does not require a “re-store” of any of the original data, but stores a compressed copy of the original data (along with its indexing information) allowing you to delete or otherwise move (or remove) the original data. Splunk then utilizes this “searchable repository” from which to efficiently graph, report, alert, dashboard and visualize in detail.
It just Works
After installation, Splunk is ready to be used. There are no additional “integration steps” required for Splunk to handle data from particular products. To date, Splunk simply works on almost any kind of data or data source you may have access to but should you actually require some assistance, there is a Splunk professional services team that can answer your questions or even deliver specific integration services.
Wrap-up
The Big Data market as measured by vendor revenue derived from sales of related hardware, software and services reached $18.6 billion in calendar year 2013. That represents a growth rate of 58% over the previous year (according to Wikibon data).
Also (according to Wikibon), Splunk had over $283 million of that “big data revenue” and has an even brighter outlook for this year. More to come for sure…
