The Big Data Beard Team is Hitting the Road for the Most Epic Road Trip to Splunk’s .conf

When most people think of fall, they think of football, pumpkin spice lattes and leaves turning their autumn colors. For us, fall means that Splunk .conf is right around the corner! This year, Splunk’s .conf is a few weeks later than it normally is. Cory Minton and Kyle Prins, and I couldn’t wait those extra weeks to get the conference kicked off, so we decided to get the festivities started early. We grabbed an RV, set up several IoT sensors, built an edge to cloud computing environment, and packed up the Big Data Beard recording equipment for an epic road-trip across the country. We are starting in Boston, Massachusetts, and will end up in Las Vegas, Nevada for .conf19. We are calling this the Road Trip 2 .conf 2019!

The Trip

Over the span of our two week journey, we will be traveling across 15 states, driving over 3,700 miles and stopping in 13 different cities to meet with Splunk users, Splunkers and the rich ecosystem of Splunk partners to learn how Splunk is being used to turn data into answers. Below is our route and dates we will be in each city.

If you live in or near one of these cities, make sure you stop by to check out the RV, talk with other Splunkers and purchase some highly coveted Road Trip 2 .conf swag. The specific locations will be posted on our Road Trip 2 .conf page. We will also be hosting happy hours in select cities, so stay tuned for those details.

Each morning we will be livestreaming a daily talk show called “Breakfast with the Beards”. We will be reviewing the trip progress via our Splunk dashboards, and chatting with some interesting guests. Below is the calendar for Breakfast with The Beards and links to the live-streams:

Additionally, every Monday-Friday, we will be recording a podcast that takes a deeper look at specific Splunk technologies and use cases. Here is the lineup:

This road trip would not be complete unless we went full Splunky. To do that we are going to transform the RV into a host=IOT_RV and Splunk all the data we collect as we roll down the highway. We are partnering with Dell Technologies, VMware and Arrow Electronics to build and deploy edge computing devices, hook up several sensors, and leverage a few apps from Splunkbase. We will work with several other Splunkers from Red River Technologies and Converging Data to transform our RV into a properly Splunked IoT playground! Here are just a few of the questions we are relying on Splunk to help us answer:

• Location – Where are we currently and how long will it take to get to our next destination?
• Road Quality – How does the quality of roads differ from state to state?
• RV Comfort – How comfortable is our RV ride?
• Health – With all this travel, are we taking care of ourselves? Do we need to walk a little more?

With 3 engineers in an RV for 14 days and only 1 bathroom, the biggest concern is cleanliness. In a take on the Dubai Airport’s Golden Bathroom, we are using Splunk to create our very own Bronze Bathroom. With Splunk and VictorOps deployed, we can understand how best to optimize our cleaning efforts.

With an estimated 60 hours of driving time, you can bet that we will be listening to a ton of music. We have Splunked our Spotify account, so we can see what songs, genre and artists we listen to the most. We also want to be able to share what we are listening to and even take some requests! To recommend a song, engage with us on Twitter!

How to engage

We will be publicly displaying all of our Splunk dashboards throughout the trip to provide real-time updates on our progress. Login information (link, username and password) will be available beginning on October 7^th on our Road Trip 2 .conf website.

If you have any ideas on additional things we can Splunk, or have questions you want to ask based on the collected data, let us know on Twitter @BigDataBeard.

Speaking of social media, get active and engage with us throughout the trip using #SplunkConf19 and #RoadTrip2conf. Don’t forget to check out our website to get access to livestreams, recordings and updates on our progress.

The RV @ .conf

We will be showcasing the RV in the expo hall starting at the Welcome Soiree on Monday night, for those of you attending .conf! Make sure you stop by to stock up on some cool RV swag and check out our dashboards using Splunk AR! We will also be presenting a break out session about the host=IOT_RV on Wednesday October 23^rd at 12:30 PDT. Make sure you add this session to your catalog.

All of this would not be possible without our fantastic sponsors who helped turn this crazy idea into reality. Each of these great companies works hard to help their customers achieve success using Splunk. We cannot thank them enough for their investment and support on this wild ride.

Lastly, we want to thank the Splunk community for their help in developing ideas that showcase the value of Splunk, and for helping us build dynamic and impactful dashboards. Thanks Tom West from Converging Data and Brandon Ganem from the Splunk Trust!

Join us as we make this the MOST EPIC Road Trip 2 .conf ever! We are super excited and look forward to sharing this awesome experience with all of you.

Your Bearded Friends,