Machines generate tremendous volumes of raw data that is not used effectively. This is because manually trawling through and making sense of vast amounts of complex and unstructured data logs proved to be too time consuming, complex and not to mention frustrating for the human mind. Splunk was first created to solve this problem. It allows users to efficiently search, correlate, analyse and visualise machine generated data from any source to optimise and improve IT operations, security and business performance.