No matter how sophisticated a set of developed solutions tools may be, the likelihood of retaining customer interest gets a big boost from those tools having an effective support system in place for users when they need some extra help.

At this year’s Splunk.conf event, Rich Mahlerwein, senior systems engineer at Forest County Potawatomi Community, and David Shpritz, information security consultant at Aplura, LLC, sat down with John Walls (@JohnWalls21) and John Furrier (@furrier), cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, to talk about the Splunk community and the many uses people are finding for its utilities.

Coming together

Both speakers were highly positive about the Splunk conference and the community it represented. “The Splunk community is completely different, and it’s unlike any other community I’ve ever seen; [it’s one] where everyone wants to help. Everyone is excited and loves this product, and they want everyone else to be excited and love this product as well, and so they help,” Shpritz said.

“I think Splunk’s willingness to put trust in its community, especially with things like [Splunk] Answers – Answers is a huge success, as far as I’m concerned – in terms of how quickly different questions, when they’re answered, get answers, the quality of those answers [is] usually pretty outstanding,” he added.

Solving the strangest problems

As far as the use-cases for Splunk go, the interviewees pointed to an incredibly wide range of applications, but they were able to hone in on some of the biggest areas. “I think security and services… those are the big focuses for a lot of our users who are coming in and talking to the community, looking at things like different security use-cases,” Shpritz said.

For Mahlerwein, the influx of these answer-seekers was a great thing. “I love seeing new people show up in the channels, or on Answers and stuff. Sometimes they come up with the most amazing solutions, too, because they approach things from a totally different angle,” he shared.

“So I really like the new blood. And the other thing I really like about the Splunk community is that, in general, I think it’s like the smartest group of people I know. It’s like there aren’t any slackers in there at all. Even the new people may not know much about Splunk yet, but gosh, they come up with some good things,” he added.

Asked to identify some of the strangest problems they’ve seen people looking to use Splunk to solve, both guests were hesitant, primarily because of the many possible answers they’d encountered. “It’s such a flexible product; it’s put to so many different kinds of uses that to pick out one or two or even three really weird things [people have come looking for solutions to] is really hard, because there’s a whole tier of the weird uses of Splunk,” Mahlerwein said.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of Splunk.conf 2016.

Photo by SiliconANGLE