In 2018, Splunk published several videos showcasing members of the SplunkTrust to share their story and passion for the Splunk community. It is currently application-season for the SplunkTrust through May 5th, 2023, and we are revisiting featured SplunkTrust members to see where they are now. Are you interested in becoming a member of the SplunkTrust? Do you know a peer that would be a great fit? Read this blog for more information about the process, and utilize the nomination and application forms.
This week we are showcasing SplunkTrust member Clara Merriman. When Clara’s video was published, she was a Business Intelligence Engineer for SONIFI Solutions:
Where is SplunkTrust member Clara Merriman now?
Clara Merriman, aka @cmerriman on Answers and the Splunk community Slack, is currently an Observability Services Manager at Splunk. You may also recognize Clara from her Clara-fication series of blog posts and .conf presentations.
We interviewed Clara for this Where Are They Now series of posts to share her career growth story with you. Read on to learn more about Clara since her video was released.
The first question I have is how is your dog, Sadie? She was featured in your video, and I know how much you love her!
Sadie’s awesome. She has had quite the year, though. She got scratched by a cat in her eye, had a couple of surgeries for that, a staph infection, and a lip infection. She’s had a year, but she is really good! She loves the snow, and when I shovel the driveway I take her out with me and she jumps in the air like a dolphin to try and catch the snow I throw for her. Also, she loves that I work from home, and if I don’t go into my office by around 8am she just sits in the office staring out of the door at me.
You’ve had quite the journey the past five years since the video was published. Tell me a bit about your path to where you are now.
When the video was shot, I was a Business Intelligence Engineer. I loved it. The data was just so fascinating. I got a job at Splunk in 2018 as a Splunk Engineer on the team that is responsible for Splunk at Splunk. They were excited for the things I did as a Business Intelligence Engineer and wanted to bring that kind of skill set over. I moved from South Dakota to California at that time. I lived in San Jose, and I would share time between our San Jose and San Francisco offices. Sadie also loved it when she could tag along to the San Francisco office. During all of this time, my skills have developed from Business Intelligence to IT to Security.
What type of work did you do as a Splunk Engineer at Splunk?
I was helping run an internal Splunk deployment, but at the time it was for everyone in the company. We supported marketing, sales, IT, security - you name it. It was sort of one stack even though there were multiple search clusters. It was kind of a cluster of an architecture, but it worked. We eventually improved on this when we migrated to Splunk Cloud Platform.
At SONIFI we had a single search head & indexer, so there was a learning curve. I didn't know much about clustering or deployment servers, or anything like that. So it's a huge learning curve, and it was exciting.
After about a year or so I was promoted to a Senior Splunk Engineer.
In addition to your internal Splunk work, you are also well known for your Clara-fication blog posts and .conf sessions.
The Clara-fication stuff has been super fun. I need to get back to the blog posts, but the .conf sessions are a change of format for me to share knowledge. I have a bunch of topics for the blog that I have started, and I just need to find the time to finish them.
A lot of people recognize me at .conf events because of my pink wig. SplunkTrust member Martin Müller and I are working together again this year on a session for .conf23 that will be interactive instead of just a breakout. I have a couple of other sessions at .conf23 as well - come check them out!
You recently were promoted again to Observability Services Manager. Tell me a bit about that.
I’ve had three different positions at Splunk, and the career development has been amazing for me. I am now the manager of the Splunk team that I was working on after the previous manager took a new role. I know where I want to go, and I try to tailor my work and education around that so I can be as successful as possible in my role and throughout my career development.
Currently we have a heavy security focus, and we are starting a center of excellence in security. It’s going to be really exciting to be a part of something so impactful.
What is some recent work that you are really proud of?
With the focus on security, our team has begun rolling out RBAC policies and the configurations to support that. My team is doing a talk on this topic at .conf23, and I’m excited for them to share their work. Over the past year or so we started doing more automation, utilizing Terraform and GitLab pipelines. We are able to automatically deploy RBAC configurations and are going to work on better index management automation.
Thank you for your time, Clara!
We appreciate everything you do as a member of the SplunkTrust and your contributions to the Splunk community. Thank you for being you!
We will publish additional Where Are They Now posts over the next weeks leading up to May 5th, 2023 when the nomination and application forms close for SplunkTrust
If you would like to learn more about the SplunkTrust program then read this blog for more information about the process. You can utilize the nomination form to refer a peer to the SplunkTrust program, and the application form to apply to the program yourself.
