SplunkBase Brings IT Troubleshooting Wiki to the Masses

OSS_ilation writes "IT troubleshooting firm Splunk is using LinuxWorld Boston as a platform to formally launch Splunk Base, a global wiki that will offer IT pros a free-of-charge venue to exchange troubleshooting information, tools and fixes. Splunk is promising that the wiki is completely vendor neutral, and can be compared to Wikipedia, the online open encyclopedia that is regulated and updated by the community-at-large. Users don't even have to have a copy of Splunk Professional to use it. From the article: 'If you believe the research from firms like Framingham, Mass.-based IDC, then Splunk Base has arrived at a key moment. According to IDC, companies will spend more than $100 billion this year on managing the world's data centers. And with virtualization quickly becoming an IT buzzword in 2006, the complexity and costs could increase.'"

Comments

how long until

[gEvil (beta)]

How long until the solution to all of the problems is "Reboot the computer"?

Great Concept

[wiz31337]

This is a great concept.

Being an IT professional, it is hard to track down solutions to difficult problems using Google alone. If you Google a problem, odds are you are going to wind up finding a message board where someone has the same issue, but no solution has been posted.

Who's going to proofread?

[trazom28]

In my field (desktop support) there's good and bad techs..and some are REALLY bad. They know a script of things to ask, but anything outside that and they are totally lost.. they can't work "out of the box" to coin the phrase.

I've also worked with some excellent techs that I've tried to learn from as much as possible, and I try to emulate as I work with customers. These are the ones that see a problem and dig in and try and solve it. Yeah, it takes time but the knowledge base built up can be helpful.

So.. on a database like this.. who's to watch the submissions to select if it's a real tested and found solution, versus something else that doesn't really work? And who's to say the solution provided is from an actual PC tech and not an armchair one? If I had a dime for every time a "friend that knows lots about computers" screws one up..

Re:A little late to the party, don't you think?

[Nimey]

This covers an area inappropriate for Wikipedia, and Experts Exchange has a yearly fee. Google is nice, but there are some things that are difficult to find on it.

Move along. There's nothing to see.

Hardly. This looks promising.

Re:A little late to the party, don't you think?

[ceejayoz]

Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, so asking/posting a bunch of technical questions and fixes will get you blocked quickly.

Expert's Exchange requires you to scroll three screens past advertisements from the actual question to the answers (when they're actually available without registering, that is). Not to mention the disgusting IntelliTXT ads they insert into the actual text...

Google can be frustrating, especaially if your search terms center around things like "C++".

Thus, I'm open to better ways of doing things, and I'll be looking at this to see if it is one.

Did you guys look at it?

[moochfish]

Well, I will admit I didn't install it, but I did browse around and take a tour.

This is nothing like wikipedia. It is a log file aggregator. It's a program that transmits and indexes log files on your UNIX/LINUX machine(s). How is that like wikipedia in the slightest? Granted, users can comment on log entries and create a knowledge base, but that doesn't make it wikipedia at all.

I think they've made a cool tool here. I can see it being useful. But the fact that they are targeting businesses and yet it trasmits all log data to a remote location will make most businesses uneasy. If the application could be setup to keep all data internal, this could be a neat tool for system administrators. But in its current form, it's only really good for hobbyists and other people who don't mind having the guts of their servers on the web ready to be searched by strangers.

How will the content be licensed? Who will own it?

[Kadin2048]

What is the license on the contributed material going to be?

How does a person know, when they're contributing, that Splunk isn't going to take the site's content at some point down the road, and turn it into some steaming pile of ads and subscription fees like Experts Exchange?

If it's a wiki, it's difficult to separate individual contributions, so a Slashdot-style "Comments are owned by the Poster" probably wouldn't work. The actual work has to be owned by somebody, and frankly I don't know Splunk from Adam and I'd certainly question whether I wanted to spend a lot of time writing an article if at some point it might just become part of their "Premium Membership" service, or if they won't let other people mirror it as a backup in case they decide that being 'community oriented' isn't paying the bills in the way they thought it would.