Yesterday AppFirst had the tremendous opportunity to demo at the Splunk User Conference (.conf2011) in support of the Developer Platform announcements that they recently made. Big thanks to Paul Sanford and Brad Lovering for their contributions! There are two scenarios for using AppFirst and Splunk together, which I’ll dive into below.

Scenario 1 is for Splunk customers. Paul sent us the Python SDK they’ve been working on, and in short order our development team (i.e., Taek Joo and Donn) had our collectors streaming data to Splunk, rather than to our backend. Using Splunk as a Platform, we can stream our complementary application behavior directly to Splunk, and Splunk users can use the existing interface they know so well to tease out the information they are looking for.

We demoed two use-cases for this scenario. How often do you need to decommission servers that aren’t being used, but don’t know where to start? We hear this frequently from customers—they don’t know which servers their applications depend on to run smoothly, because interdependencies between servers are difficult to map. Many customers have a mental model of these interdependencies, but don’t know for certain if that model reflects reality. If one wrong wire gets tripped, it could lead to disaster! One of the Splunk searches we created was identifying which IP addresses Membase accessed. Another search we created was to view the number of sockets, and the amount of CPU and memory being used when our frontend’s response time exceeded 1 second.

Scenario 2 gives AppFirst customers access to the power of Splunk search (we’re very excited about this!). In this case AppFirst customers, using our SaaS-based solution, will have access to Splunk data through the AppFirst UI, to search for specific information. When our collectors stream to our backend, we’ll do the processing and store data in Membase and Splunk for indexing. This feature is already in development. All that’s left is to surface Splunk search in our UI.

There were over 600 people attending the event yesterday. Based on the heat index in the room, it felt like almost all of them were in our breakout session. All in all, we were proud to be invited to participate in such an extremely popular event, and were thrilled for the opportunity to demonstrate the value-adding benefits of combining the Splunk Platform with AppFirst – a truly powerful combination!