Conference and training from the perspective of a new Splunk user

I had the chance to attend the Power User Bootcamp training at the Splunk .conf18 conference in Orlando. It was a real experience — both in terms of how such a massive event was organised, the breadth of topics covered, and the opportunity to get information straight "from the source." During the training we had about 10 people available to help us better understand the material and give us a hand whenever we got stuck on an exercise. For any out-of-session questions, if they couldn't answer themselves they referred us directly to the colleague who specialises in that area. Great approach.

The conference covered a huge range of topics. Not just cybersecurity — I shouldn't forget financial crime. IoT owners and people responsible for operations were well catered for too. The volume of talks was incredible and there was no way to catch everything. Even so, you come away with plenty of impressions and information that you'll hopefully manage to put into practice before next year. Looking back, you realise that Splunk really is a universal tool — which can't be said for its competitors.

Hopefully next year it'll work out to go to Vegas for .conf19.