Log management review: Splunk 4 [Video]

Splunk doesn’t have all the features of the top competitors, but pairs good value with an active development community

Credit: Andrey_Popov/Shutterstock

It’s fair to say that I learned a lot about log management through Splunk. A few years ago, I used Splunk for a variety of computer security applications, most notably to collect and forward events across a wide range of machines. Picking it up again two years later, I was pleasantly surprised to find that Splunk has become feature-rich and very handy beyond its early origins.

For this review, I installed Splunk 4.1.2 across a few different platforms. Splunk comes as a single installer, available for Windows (XP and later), Linux, Unix, BSD, Mac, and a few other operating systems, including a few of the most popular network devices.

Depending on how you decide to use Splunk, all the components can be installed on a single computer; at a minimum, Splunk …