Splunk administration - getting started and career path

[Franc21244]

Greetings all,

Am new to Splunk and am very fascinated by its growth and worthiness in the world of IT. How can one make a career path as a Splunk Administrator or Engineer.

Thanks

[DalJeanis]

No amount of "pretend" work is going to teach you everything you need to know to make a career of splunk, but the more different aspects of splunk that you play with, and the more splunk people that you connect with and interact with, the more likely you will be to be able to take advantage of the career opportunities that come up. So, here's some suggestions:

1) Learn. Take classes, but also buy and read books, and especially, read answers.splunk.com. Look for questions here that you ALMOST know the answer to, research the answer and answer them as simply, eloquently and helpfully as you can.

2) Connect. Find Splunk events in your part of the world, and go to them. Get on the Splunk Slack channel and be helpful there. Put Splunk on your own LinkedIn profile and connect up there with me and other Splunk folks. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/daljeanis/)

3) Practice. If you don't have access to a real splunk instance at work, then put one on your own computer, toss some public data into it and "go wild" making dashboards, visualizations, and pulling information out of the data.

4) Be curious, and fearless. That's not just about splunk, it's generally good advice for getting where you want to go. Nonetheless, get in the habit of trying things with Splunk. Every time you have to restore or rebuild your sandbox because you screwed something up, you either learn something or get useful practice. Fail fast, learn fast, and move on.

[skoelpin]

@DalJeanis is spot on with points 3 and 4. Your Splunk growth will come from doing projects and being curious about new use cases. It also helps being in a large org and getting asked to do the impossible every day with Splunk so your exposed to different ways at solving problems.

Also, my shameless plug 🙂

www.linkedin.com/in/skoelpin

[ChrisG · Accepted solution]

There are many good resources to get started with Splunk software. Previous Splunk Answers posting have covered this in detail. See https://answers.splunk.com/answers/448149/new-to-splunk-are-there-any-study-guides-to-unders.html and go from there.

In terms of a career path, train yourself using those resources and pursue the Splunk Education certification tracks, for Admin and Architect: https://www.splunk.com/en_us/training.html.

There are many companies looking for candidates with expertise and experience using Splunk products. Doing a basic internet search for Splunk administrator jobs should give you a sense of what is available and the kinds of skills those companies are looking for.

[Franc21244]

Thank you very much. I will do as suggested

[logloganathan]

You can start with splunk fundamental - 1 course which is free e-learning one
Practice the splunk query with simple example
Apply the same in the organization you work
You will be best on one day