It seems that Splunk can prove useful given that: 1) Simple data upload and indexing 2) A simple query language 3) Visualizations and Dashboards that can be set to periodic/ real-time. 4) Ability to guess your source data or create custom mapping for fields. Yet, I see that most implementations are for Network hardware and Security monitoring. Can anyone share your insight and experience? Thanks.
Yah, they're a (minor) ex-competitor of the big data companies I used to work for. Good for aggregation and analysis on log files, and relatively lightweight on system resources; not so much with validation, cleaning, or any sort of serious analytics use. More of an end-user tool with lots of pre-built stuff. Not saying they're bad, it's just a relatively narrow market segment. Would it be good for market analysis? Well, you could poke at it - they've got a free version - but I seriously doubt it. It's neither oriented toward anything like that nor, IMO, flexible enough. If you want a dashboard with a full-power back end, take a look at Databricks. They've also got a free version, but it's definitely enough to build whatever you want (and you can scale out if you decide to.) I'll put it this way: my job required having familiarity with essentially all major products in the Big Data space, and Databricks is what I use exclusively for any analytics at scale.