2 weeks ago I had the opportunity to attend the 7th anual Splunk Conference – .conf2016 in Orlando, Florida. In this post I want to briefly share my experience with you.
It all started with a 2 day Splunk University Bootcamp, which is basically a 2 day course with one Splunk course each day. I took the “Searching and Reporting” course on Sunday, September 25 and the “Knowledge Objects” course on Monday, September 26. The courses were great. The instructor, which was a Splunk employee, was really good and we did tons of labs in order to practice what we had learned.
On Tuesday, after the 2 day course, the conference started with the main keynote at 9 AM opening with the CEO of Splunk, Doug Merrit. He announced many new features, including a new major release of Splunk. After that the regular 45 minute sessions started. There were many interesting sessions! Sometimes I had to choose between 3 that were scheduled in the same time block. I went to all I could go until 6 PM each day of the conference. It was pretty intense.
Most of the sessions (I’d say 95% of them) were really good, with great speakers, live demos and real world problems and solutions. This is were most of the value of the conference was. I was able to see how others were solving problems with Splunk at their companies and organizations. It made me realize you could do so much and take advantage of a powerful tool like Splunk to improve efficiencies and cut resource losses by monitoring everything (really, everything) and be in control of your operation, end to end.
At the same time, there was the Pavilion going on. All the booths of the companies that are partners with Splunk were here. There was also a video game area, food, and Splunk booths showing demos of what you can do with Splunk. This was really useful to me since I could see things that others were doing that I had no idea you could do with Splunk. There was also a small theatre area for short announcements and more demos.
Food! Food was infinite during the conference. There was food, soda and Starbucks coffee everywhere during the day. Really cool. Breakfast and lunch were server in a huge tent – more like a building – specially built for this. There was a lot of variety. It was really good.
On Tuesday night, from 8 PM to 12 PM, we were invited to the Disney Hollywood Studios for the conference party. All the attractions were open just for the attendees! You could go on a roller coaster or a Star Wars tours if you wanted to. And of course there was food everywhere. And DJs playing music, and more food. I had never been to Disney before so this was a truly great experience for me. I was already impressed with the conference itself, but this party at the Disney Hollywood Studios improved the whole experience a lot.
On Thursday, after 2 days of classes and 3 days of conference, attending to sessions, meeting people, learning, learning and learning, it was time to go back home to apply everything I learned.