Splunk Lantern is a Splunk customer success center that provides advice from Splunk experts on valuable data insights, key use cases, and tips on managing Splunk more efficiently.
We also host Getting Started Guides for a range of Splunk products, a library of Product Tips, and Data Descriptor articles that help you see everything that’s possible with data sources and data types in Splunk.
This month, we're excited to share a major update regarding the future of Splunk Lantern: a sneak peek at our website redesign! We've been working hard to make Lantern even more intuitive and valuable, and we've attached a wireframe of the proposed new homepage for you to review. We're eager to gather your thoughts and feedback on this new design, which aims to streamline navigation and enhance content accessibility across key areas. Read on to find out more.
The Challenge: Organizing Splunk Software’s Diverse Uses
Splunk provides incredibly powerful software that’s capable of addressing a vast array of use cases across security and observability, and it’s Splunk Lantern’s job to make those use cases easily discoverable and digestible. But that’s not always easy when we have more than a thousand addressing a hugely diverse set of customer needs. Our latest redesign effort tackles this challenge by making it easier than ever to access the use cases, best practices, and other prescriptive guidance you’re looking for, directly from our homepage.
We’ll walk through each section of our new homepage wireframe step-by-step, explain the rationale behind each change, and invite you to share your thoughts at the end of this blog.
Searching For The Light
Different people use Lantern in different ways. Some people use Google as their starting point to jump directly to the articles they’re looking for, while others start at www.lantern.splunk.com directly and use the site navigation or our search feature to find what they need. You can see our site search marked in red in the screenshot below.
The location and content of our search experience won’t be changing with our homepage redesign. We know that many users find the content they’re looking for successfully by using search.
What’s more, we’ve recently enhanced our search experience so if you’re curious to see which other Splunk sites have results that match your search term, you can use filters to add these sources into your search. Try it out sometime!
Achieve Your Use Cases
In the following sections of this blog, you'll find rough wireframes illustrating the primary sections and links we envision for our new homepage. These are functional outlines, not final designs, so please focus on the proposed structure and content organization rather than their appearance - the finished product will look much nicer!
We want to make it easier than ever to help you solve your real-world challenges with Splunk software. We're moving away from organizing our use cases within our Use Case Explorers, and working to cut out unnecessary layers so you can get to the content you’re looking for with fewer clicks. From the front page of Lantern, we want you to be able to see all our Security and Observability use case categories and access the use cases held within them with a single click.
We know that there’s tremendous interest in use cases that show how Splunk and Cisco work together, how Splunk can be integrated with AI tools, and how Splunk can help specific industries with use cases tailor-made for them. That’s why, right underneath our main Security and Observability use case categories, we’re adding buttons to take you to new content hubs for these popular topics. Each of these hubs will act as a homepage for everything to do with the topic, collecting Lantern’s articles and links to other Splunk resources, so you can find all the information you need in one place.
We want to know: Does this structure effectively guide you to solutions for your specific needs? Are there any categories you feel are missing or could be better highlighted?
Administer Your Environment
For those managing Splunk deployments, this section provides essential guidance. From getting started with Splunk software and implementing it as a program, to migrating to Splunk Cloud Platform and managing platform performance and health, you'll be able to click into each of these categories to find key resources to get you managing Splunk in an organized and professional way.
- Get Started with Splunk Software: This link will take you to all our Getting Started Guides for Security, Observability, and the Platform. Currently, our Getting Started Guides are spread across different places in Lantern, so through centralizing them we're hoping to make it easier to find all of these comprehensive learning paths from a single location.
- Implement Splunk Software as a Program: This link will take you straight to the Splunk Success Framework, which contains guidance from Splunk experts on the best ways to implement Splunk.
- Migrate to Splunk Cloud Platform: This link will take you to our Splunk Cloud Platform Migration content.
- Manage Splunk Performance and Health: This link will take you to all our other content that helps you stay on top of your evolving environment needs. From content like Running a Splunk platform health check to topics like Understanding workload pricing in Splunk Cloud Platform, this area will act as a hub for tips and tricks from expert Splunkers to ensure your environment runs optimally.
We want to know: Does this section help you find information on the critical administrative tasks you encounter? How easy do you think it will be to find the information you need to manage your Splunk environment effectively?
Manage Your Data
Data is at the heart of Splunk software, and this section of Lantern is dedicated to helping you master it. Each of the categories within this area contains quite a few subcategories, so we’re planning to add in drop-downs containing clickable links for each of these areas to help you drill down to the content within them more quickly.
- Platform Data Management: This drop-down will contain a number of new topic areas that are designed to help you more effectively optimize data within the Splunk platform. We’re expecting the links in this area will include:
- Optimize your data
- Data pipeline transformation
- Data privacy and protection
- Unified data insights
- Real-time data views
- AI-driven data analysis
- Data Sources: This drop-down will contain each of the Data Sources that you can currently find on our Data Descriptors page. From Amazon to Zscaler and every data source in between, all of our data sources will be shown alphabetically in this dropdown, and you can click into each of these pages right from our homepage.
- Data Types: Like Data Sources, this drop-down will contain each of the Data Types that you can currently find on our Data Descriptors page. Whether you’re curious about what else you can do with Compliance data or looking for insights into your IoT data, all of Lantern’s data type articles will be accessible from this place.
We want to know: Is this categorization clear and helpful for managing your data? What kind of data management resources on Lantern do you find most valuable?
Featured Articles
Finally, we don’t anticipate any changes to how our featured articles look and behave, although they’ll be moving down to the end of our homepage.
Tell Us What You Think!
You can look at the final wireframe that shows all the homepage sections together here.
Your feedback is incredibly important in shaping the future of Splunk Lantern, so please take a moment to complete our quick survey and share what you think.
We want to ensure that any changes we make are all aiding our mission to make it easier for you to find more value from Splunk software, so whatever your thoughts are on this new design, we’d really like to hear from you.
Thank you for reading, for being a part of the Splunk community, and for helping us make Splunk Lantern the best resource it can be!
- Kaye Chapman, Senior Lantern Content Specialist for Splunk Lantern
