Developer Spotlight with Guilhem Marchand

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From Splunk Engineer to Founder: The Journey Behind TrackMe 

After spending over 12 years working full time on Splunk, Guilhem has seen the platform evolve dramatically — together with his own journey. For the past 7 years, he has been part of Splunk’s Professional Services ecosystem in EMEA as a partner, helping organizations unlock real value and operational visibility from their data. 

The Birth of TrackMe 

Around 2017, while working on various Splunk implementations, Guilhem identified a recurring challenge: once data was ingested into Splunk, teams often struggled to maintain visibility on data feed quality, availability, and operational health. 

That’s how TrackMe was born — initially as an open-source Splunk app designed to help teams track and monitor their Splunk data feeds with ease. It quickly resonated with the community, gaining adoption across organizations worldwide. 

From Open Source to a Company

 

Recognizing the widespread use and value of TrackMe, Guilhem took the next step in 2021 by founding TrackMe Limited in the UK, transforming his “Splunk baby” into a full-fledged product and business. Today, TrackMe empowers Splunk users globally—from the US and Europe to the UK and Australia—with a free community edition and premium enterprise editions. Despite being a small company, TrackMe serves many large organizations, with Guilhem acting as the principal developer and director, driving both the technology and the vision. 

 

What TrackMe Does 

TrackMe is tailored specifically for Splunk Enterprise and Splunk Cloud environments. It provides visibility and operational excellence by monitoring, at scale, the availability and quality of data sources — and much more. Over time, the product has expanded beyond feed tracking to include machine learning, field quality monitoring, and advanced workflow management. The app integrates with a growing ecosystem, including Splunk SOAR, Cribl LogStream, Palo Alto XSOAR, and Google SecOps.  

 

High-Level Business Metrics Indicating TrackMe’s Success 

TrackMe has consistently maintained a 5-star rating on Splunkbase. Since its inception, it has been downloaded 24,761 times. The company has a successful number of paying customers, including many Fortune 100 clients. TrackMe plays a key role for a diverse range of Splunk customers, spanning on-premise to cloud-based deployments. 

 

Major Costs and Resource Constraints in Building TrackMe 

• Application Maintenance: Keeping the app updated is challenging due to evolving Splunk technologies, deprecations, and the need for regular updates. Splunk Cloud has improved with fully automated application vetting; however, app developers should remain vigilant of changes to the underlying platform—reflected through upcoming AppInspect requirements–that can impact app compatibility. For applications like TrackMe, this represents a major concern, and it is something that Guilhem is closely monitoring. 

• Qualification in Splunk Cloud: Developing and qualifying in Splunk Enterprise alone is insufficient; TrackMe releases undergo rigorous qualification in a true distributed Splunk Cloud environment using SCDE. 

• Technical Resources: TrackMe uses dedicated bare metal servers with custom automation and the Splunk Automator (Ansible-based) to run continuous production environments and create/destroy fresh deployments for testing. 

• Complex Deployment Factors: Support for FIPS and other complex options requires testing in valid environments. TrackMe ingests its own infrastructure logs and uses custom data generators for testing. 

 

Favorite Developer Tools and Resources for Building Splunk Apps 

• Cursor AI: Intensively used for continuous development and Pull Request reviews, Cursor AI was fundamental in TrackMe’s transition to React native user interfaces. 

• Promox VE: Used for virtualization of development environments. 

• Docker: Containerizes tooling such as Eventgen, Splunk EAM, and Jenkins. 

• Jenkins: Manages creation, destruction, and maintenance of testing environments daily. 

• GitHub Actions: Automates CICD pipelines; every TrackMe release is built, qualified, and inspected automatically in fresh containers. 

• Appinspect API: Integrated into CICD pipelines for Pull Request validation, with custom Python handlers. 

• Splunk UI: Forms the foundation of TrackMe’s user interfaces. 

• Splunk UCC Framework: Used since early stages, serving as the backbone of the app. 

 

Major Milestone Achieved 

TrackMe has just announced the migration from the legacy JavaScript stack to native React with Splunk UI. There has been extremely positive feedback and a product that has entered a totally different dimension of quality and richness. The goal is to make TrackMe a truly modular, responsive, and future-proof solution for Splunk users worldwide. 

Though TrackMe Limited remains a small company, it is built on a decade of hands-on Splunk experience, community trust, and relentless focus on operational excellence. Guilhem is excited about the future of TrackMe and the growing community of Splunk professionals who continue to inspire its evolution. 

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