Beau Christensen, Lead Site Reliability Engineer, PingIdentity , with Jeff Frick and Jeff Kelly

Back at TheCube, SiliconANGLE’s premier video program, Wikibon Analyst Jeff Kelly and SiliconANGLE Executive in Residence Jeff Frick had the pleasure of interviewing Beau Christensen, the Lead Site Reliability Engineer at Ping Identity, another satisfied customer of Splunk, at their annual .conf2012 event.

Ping Identity provides single sign-on identity security for 800 of the world’s largest companies, securing millions of corporate identities of employees around the globe.  They do mobile and API security as well as federated identity.

According to Christensen, they use Splunk for operational intelligence just like other Splunk customers do.  They also use Splunk for security purposes, as it is tied indirectly to their security infrastructures.  There’s also a place for Splunk in Ping Identity’s business intelligence initiatives, and the company’s support teams use it to diagnose customer issues.

Kelly noted that most of Splunk’s clients downloaded Splunk and used it mainly for IT monitoring, but the use usually expands throughout the organization.  Christensen agrees with Kelly, stating that that’s what exactly happened to them.

“We downloaded it we were originally going to use it – we’ve had hundreds of VMs that we have across multiple data centers and had a problem of managing and auditing access to sensitive log files,” Christensen said.

“It started there and from there, we’ve discovered how much information we could pull out of this machine data in our first generation product.  In our second generation product, we were able to then integrate a lot of the machine data in log files with Splunk.  And having Splunk in mind and in our dashboards to be able to pull additional business metrics – event types, alerting, everything – that we could out of the system.”

Frick was curious as to how Splunk became an important part of their system, asking if there was a breakthrough app that brought Splunk into more aspects of their business.

Christensen stated that they originally built their dashboard for his team in operations to see the amount of traffic per day and how it fluctuated during the week to then use the gathered data for noting trends.  Ping Identity will use the trend data for their weekly status report.  Then they started using the trending data on their executive reports, and then people from their office got curious, asking to use Splunk for their departments as well. In the end, they got tired of taking requests and making reports for others, so they built an app that would allow different departments to see the data they need.

Kelly also asked about Splunk’s role in DevOps, to which Christensen first explained the relationship between engineering and operations, boiling down to integration for the two teams.

To know more about Splunk’s role in Ping Identity, click here.