Splunk: A play on words and a minor correction

Forbes mag says that Splunk.com's moniker is a play on "spelunking," a term coined by IT specialists to describe sifting through mountains of machine data. Or so they say. In fact it's a word that means "caving", as in cave exploring. So to say it's a coinage is wrong or a stretch at best but it is an interesting new use for an existing form.

That trifle aside, it's an interesting company that uses indexing to assist trawling through log files for data mining purposes. They offer a free download which I haven't tried as yet but will. It's meant for IT shops and the like but anything that indexes alerts and log files can't help but assist in managing anything ummm, voluminous and ineffable. Like IT generally.