SPLUNK .conf25, Boston – Enterprise software developers serve many masters, from the companies they work with to the customers who expect and demand new features and fixes in the critical business applications they use in their work.
To help them in this work, one of the greatest resources developers can have are active, vibrant and responsive online developer communities where thousands of developers can share experiences, advice, challenges, and fixes 24/7 around the globe.
In the world of data platform vendor, Splunk, that is exactly what developers enjoy, according to several developers who spoke with ChannelE2E here at the
recent Splunk .conf25 user conference in Boston.
“Communities are really important to developers,”
Brett Adams, a specialist director who runs the Splunk implementation team for Deloitte Australia in Brisbane, told us at the event. “You probably learn more from each other than you do from technical things from vendors.”
And gathering in person adds even more to those
shared experiences and assistance from the Splunk community, its Slack channels and its developer program, said Adams, who is also a member of the Splunk developer advisory council.
“We get to work throughout the whole year on things [through the communities], but just being here and talking to fellow developers and meeting people in person that I've talked to virtually for many years is always valuable.”
At Splunk .conf25, Adams shared some of his expertise in three breakout sessions he presented for other developers on topics ranging from vehicle telematics using Splunk edge hub, a deep dive on Splunk metrics, and a discussion on data cost optimization.
“At the conference, you get to learn,” he said. “The value I get is to talk to some of the Splunk developers and people behind the products and I can find out that little bit extra that I need to know.”
The Benefits of In-Person Networking: Developer
William Searle, a professional services consultant and founder of LiveHybrid, a Splunk partner in Leeds, England, told ChannelE2E that while he came to the conference to present a session about how to automate Splunk Cloud deployments using Splunk Admin Config Service, his biggest benefit from the event are the in-person discussions with other Splunk community developers.
“Meeting like-minded people and networking is a big, big part of conference networking, and going over to the Splunk Builder Bar and meeting the developers who are building the tools that I am using to build apps is important for me,” he said. “I need to know who to contact if I have an application problem. Instead of just firing an email to a generic mailbox, I can now message someone who I have networked with and met.”
One area where this can help is for a customer who wants to get access to a Splunk cloud developer stack that has been talked about for several years and is now in private preview, he said. “My customer is quite keen to get on it. So, I was able to speak to the people who manage the wait list. … and understand where it is going and what is expected and to tell them what I need. It is a two-way show and that is great.”
Advice from Splunk’s Director of Developer Evangelism, Observability
Greg Leffler knows all about the power of the Splunk developer community. As Splunk’s director of developer evangelism for Splunk Observability, Leffler met with ChannelE2E at .conf25 to talk about how its developer communities are continuing to grow to further support its platforms and products.
“One of the things that I am hearing more is that people are asking about our observability approach, tools, and platform,” said Leffler. “Historically, observability has not been an area where I think people thought of Splunk.”
That has been changing, though, as Splunk has been working on its observability tools, which monitor the health and operations of business-critical customer applications, he said. At .conf25, the company unveiled its new agentic AI-powered
Splunk Observability platform, which is an AI-native approach to observability to help customers improve their data operations.
Splunk Observability gives enterprises the ability to carefully monitor how their applications are working so they can fine tune them as needed wherever they are running, said Leffler. It can show companies a myriad of details, including whether orders are getting into the order processing system, if the orders are leaving warehouses, whether CRM and ERP are properly working and tied in and more, said Leffler. “We can pull in your whole business and put it in one place, and it is way better for them. It is not just the development process.
For developers, this all provides huge opportunities to get involved in this still emerging area of observability, said Leffler. Interested developers should learn all they can right now about the related
Open Telemetry (OTel) project, which is the industry standard way to get data into an observability system, said Leffler.
“Basically everybody in this industry has moved to OTel as their as their data ingestion format,” he said, and Splunk is the project’s top contributor, with about 40 fulltime developers working on it, he said. “It is a big deal to us, and it helps with a lot of pain points that developers have experienced.
“It is an exciting time in observability,” said Leffler. “If you are a developer looking for your next step, you need to get familiar with OTel to get involved in observability and instrumentation. You can hop on it now, and use all of that to help your career progression and growth, which is a constant topic developers complain about, right? We have refined enough of it to where you can pick it up and you can start building it.”
With the continuing growth of AI, demand for observability is going to increase, according to Leffler. “You need reliable observability of your AI infrastructure, and AI needs to chew in all the data on all of your infrastructure, and OTel is how you get that data right. It is all tagged, it is all ready for AI to consume. That is really going to be critical to any developer.”
