This book is intended for experienced IT personnel who are just getting started working with Splunk and who want or need to quickly get to the heart of the matters of architecting, implementing, and administering Splunk, as well as working with Splunk search and several key apps to extract value from collected data and/or help their user base to do so. Business users who need to leverage Splunk to extract useful data from Splunk by building reports, dashboards, and alerts, and perhaps even utilize the Machine Learning Toolkit or one of Splunk's premium apps, such as Enterprise Security, will also benefit from this book, as it is a quick read that will help them better understand and work with the underlying technology from which their rich datasets and solutions are derived, and gain insights that may foster ideas for extracting even more value from their data.

This book is obviously too short to provide complete coverage of all of Splunk's features, possible configurations, and related options (that would require a few thousand pages), but it does strive to provide an introduction to all of the most crucial topics, sufficient information and examples to get the immediate job done, and sufficient insights to support intelligent and efficient research to fill in any gaps and successfully complete customizations of a Splunk environment to suit any business environment or situation.