Three Steps to Maximize Your Time at Splunk .conf21 Virtual With the ITOps Track

Are You Ready? Splunk’s .conf21 Virtual is right around the corner!

If you're like me, your inbox is out of control, your calendar is full, and for some of us, you're navigating kids going back to school! To help, I thought I'd outline three simple steps to get you ready for .conf21 Virtual. These steps will allow you to maximize your time and value online on Oct. 19-20, 2021.

3 Simple Steps

Step 1: Register for .conf21 Virtual!
If you haven't already registered, take a moment to do so. Explore the .conf21 Virtual website to familiarize yourself with all that .conf has to offer this year.

Step 2: Get the inside scoop!
Check out my "top 10 list" of recommended .conf21 Virtual ITOps sessions — review the list to find the sessions that matter most to you.

1. Microsoft 365: Flying Blind at What Costs? - ITO1418C 
Learn about how two (2) large customers [Accenture and Wells Fargo] are recognizing the benefits from the Splunk Content Packs for Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft 365. Best manage your operations and deliver the highest service levels to your customers with visibility across your on-prem and cloud services as you migrate and reallocate resources to maximize value. Get instant insights from an: executive, business leader, security, DevOps and IT operations perspective.
 

2. Adaptive Thresholding... Demystified! - ITO1576C 
Did you know that adaptive thresholding with Splunk ITSI brings AI and ML to your organization's IT and business operations? We'll demystify those adaptive threshold algorithms! To start, we'll review the algorithms and implementation in detail. After that, we'll apply our learning through an interactive thresholding session of some real-world KPIs from a customer environment. You'll leave confidently understanding how to apply AT (Adaptive Thresholding) in your environment.
 

3. How To Build and Scale Services and KPIs Using Service Templates in IT Service Intelligence - ITO1165C 
Do you like manually creating Services and KPIs in ITSI? Then this is NOT the session for you. However, if centralized management, automation and clever processes are more your thing, this is your session! This session is enablement focused, demo-heavy and covers best practices for creating Services and Service Trees automatically, where we walk through, soup to nuts, the process of creating KPIs, a vetting process to ensure they will work at scale and how to apply them to all relevant services via service templates. Participants will leave with practical examples and a documented methodology to use in their own environments.
 

4. Boss of Operations and Observability (BOO) - Register Here Now! 
Join us for our newest version of Boss of Operations and Observability (BOO) competition taking place October 18th 6PM (Pacific Time). BOO is a capture-the-flag-esque game, with a focus on Splunk’s IT and Observability product suites. BOO provides a fun and realistic approach to using Splunk. In its fifth consecutive year, BOO will provide gamers with real-world, real-time incidents where they assume the role of an Analyst or Engineer to investigate outages, monitor their cloud environment, triage incidents using event analytics, use anomaly detection...and many more. During this time, you will race the clock (and your peers) and try to earn your team bragging rights to the world or maybe, just enjoy the journey, learn something new and have fun along the way.
 

5. Data Drivers: Racing to Observability in IT - ITO1117C 
IT Modernization is a journey; why not use a McLaren to get there? Data Drivers is a series of iRacing.com sim-races and live-streamed hackathons leading participants through a hands-on learning experience with Splunk Observability Cloud and IT Service Intelligence. We partnered with McLaren’s Shadow Esports team and their manager, Tobin Leigh, to build powerful insights by turning more than 300 metrics into actionable intelligence for the racers and the management team. Join this session to see how Splunk Observability Cloud and IT Service Intelligence powered this fun and engaging series and learn how you can get your hands on the wheel and the data with us in the future. Whatever you’re into, be data driven. Join Data Drivers.
 

6. Touring the Software Factory: Get Visibility Into Your Pipeline Analytics to Ship Better Software Faster With GitHub - DEV1453B 
Whether you're a Security Ninja, DevOps Guru or an ITOps Rockstar, this tour of the factory has something for you. The first stop on the tour will be source code storage, where you can spot the hive of activity buzzing around different repos, then it's off to the assembly line where we'll see the flow code move through different pipelines and packaging. We'll wrap up our tour at quality control, where you'll see agents investigating malicious commits or knockoff libraries. The software factory is more exciting than you may have thought, and Splunk has teamed up with GitHub to release a new set of add-ons and apps to provide easy visibility into your GitHub based factory!
 

7. Using Splunk Synthetic Monitoring Inside Splunk IT Service Intelligence - ITO1640 
Learn how to integrate Splunk Synthetic Monitoring into your Splunk ITSI instance in a useful way. How do I use data from Splunk Synthetic Monitoring alongside various other types of data that already exist within my Splunk Enterprise instance? You'll learn how that integration works and how to use it in the larger view of Service Intelligence you see in ITSI.
 

8. SNMP - The 90s Want Their Network Management Back! - ITO1393C 
We'll focus on the good, the bad and the ugly of onboarding SNMP data into Splunk. We'll showcase the new Splunk Connect for SNMP, a highly scalable massively redundant container-based onboarding solution and we'll dive deep into processing SNMP traps and enterprise-wide SNMP polling. We'll also cover different deployment scenarios and implementation best practices. If you have a network and care about its performance, you don't want to miss this session.
 

9. Using Splunk to Monitor SAP: The Good, The Bad and the Ugly - ITO1223B 
If your company uses SAP and it's a blind spot for you, you'll want to join us for this session. Splunk Service Intelligence for SAP (SI for SAP), provides out-of-the-box visibility into your SAP systems, identifies problematic hot spots in real time and uses Machine Learning-based predictive analytics to identify brewing misconfigurations as well as faulty functional components. In this session, we'll deep dive into the tips and tricks of leveraging ITSI, PowerConnect and SI for SAP to build and enhance E2E visibility into critical business processes. Learn how real-time SAP KPI monitoring of security user compliance, infrastructure and business data helps prevent SAP outages and lower problem resolution times.
 

10. Secrets From the Developer Kitchen - Develop On Splunk Like a Pro With UCC, Visual Studio Code and Git - DEV1147C 
Do you want to learn the pros' and insiders' secret development techniques? Do you want to learn how to use tools like Visual Studio Code to build, debug and inspect code? What about using Git and CI/CD workflows? If you answered "yes" to any of these questions, this session is for you! Learn how to use Universal Configuration Console (UCC) to generate flexible user interfaces for your add-ons, just like Splunk built apps on Splunkbase. Discover how VSCode can help debug code, preview UI and inspect code for best practices. But wait, there's more! If you have previously built add-ons with Add-on Builder, you'll learn how to convert from a single developer tool to a multi-developer collaboration. Let's get developing like a pro!

Step 3: Spread the word!
Share recommended sessions with other Splunk enthusiasts! Let's help our IT Ops peers find value as they explore, learn and connect at .conf21 Virtual.

Additional .conf21 Virtual and ITOps Resources

Check it out. A few other key resources for you to leverage:

1. Blogs on .conf & SplunkLive!
2. .conf21 Virtual Splunk4U Track: The Best From Community, DEI, Splunk for Good, and Splunk on Splunk
3. Fall Is Coming, and So Is .conf21 Virtual! – An ITOps Track Preview
4. Managing IT Just Got Easier: Introducing the New Splunk App for Content Packs
    

Closing Thoughts

1. Data is essential to powering your business and helping you solve day-to-day challenges. The sessions I'm recommending will enable you to make better informed decisions when building your personal agenda. 
2. What more do you need from Splunk solutions? I'd be remiss if I did not ask. Would you be interested in being a Design Partner or Beta Customer to share new capabilities? Let's go through this journey together! 
3. I look forward to connecting during .conf21 Virtual. Share your thoughts and ideas — we all have something to learn.
    

This blog post was authored by Todd DeCapua, IT Field Solutions Engineer at Splunk with help from Jenna Eagle and Jon LeBaugh at Splunk.

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