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Cisco Acquires Splunk

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Re: Cisco Acquires Splunk

#461

Post by dang »

arcticbull wrote: post #441
mmahemoff wrote: post #439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They bought $127 call options (the right to buy Splunk at $127) while Splunk was valued at $119 and the options were due to expire in one day. That's a cheap option to buy, given the improbability of a sudden jump like that. The only way the buyer could make a profit would be for Splunk to go higher than $127 and if it went significantly higher, they'd stand to make an eye-watering return-on-investment multiple in on…

> the right to sell Splunk at $127 Calls are the right to buy at $127 - the shares received can then be sold at market price. Puts are the right to sell at $127 - the short position can then be closed by buying at market price.

We did a s/sell/buy/ in the GP by the author's request. Thanks!

Re: Cisco Acquires Splunk

#462

Post by teach »

anonzzzies wrote: post #250
teach wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm gonna respectfully disagree that it fails "at a few TB". We send them 100s of terabytes a day.

But, and this is not meant as criticism or insult as I have no idea how Splunk works, it is just based on other comments; do you know what license your company has with them? It appears that if you are paying them millions, it scales fine, otherwise, it does not?

I'm certainly not a Splunk expert and I'm CERTAINLY have no insight into the nature of our financial arrangement with them, but yeah it's expensive.

I think there's not much of a useful "flat rate" tier; you pay based on usage. People can accidentally spin up a ton of EC2 instances and get a huge surprise AWS bill, too. And yeah our logging needs are high and monotonically increasing but they're also relatively predictable at our scale.

It ALSO turns out though that Splunk is really really good at their job and matching their expertise would require tons of engineering effort and it's not like the disk space alone is THAT cheap if you want it to be searchable.

Re: Cisco Acquires Splunk

#463

Post by 0xEFF »

sethammons wrote: post #434
bugsense wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Splunk is a dead player too. It's a great match.

Splunk is hands down the best log analysis tooling I've used. If not for the hefty price tag, I'd use it for my personal stuff and every workplace I've been. Structured logs and Splunk are the stuff dreams are made of if you care about monitoring the quality of software. The logs into metrics abilities along with the ability to unlock finding relationships in data is amazing. Mouse over the fields found in logs match…

Splunk has delivered this level of innovation and quality since 2007 when I first used it.

We used Splunk to associate a change request ticket number all the way through the change control process to the Puppet log output tagging each change to the original business purpose.

It was like magic for auditors back then and I rarely see that depth of tracing automated changes to business purpose in the field today, though we get close with gitops.

Re: Cisco Acquires Splunk

#464

Post by hdmoore »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #311
baq wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why companies die in the long run. Microsoft dominated the nineties especially and the naughts less so but still because the marginal price of their OS was zero - due to piracy. Yes they didn't like business to run unlicensed but if you were a customer, nobody cared, because in 5-10-20 years you'd be a paying business or would work for a paying business. Splunk doesn't get that. There are no hobbyist/prosumer…

> Splunk doesn't get that. There are no hobbyist/prosumer splunk installations. Zero. Nada. Not true. I ran a free (legit!) Splunk instance in my homelab for years. It's been several years since I shut the homelab down, so I couldn't tell you if they still have hobbyist licensing, but they certainly had it in the past.

The move to make all free instances unauthenticated (and effectively RCE-aaS) put a dent in that use.

Re: Cisco Acquires Splunk

#465

Post by blindriver »

likium wrote: post #456
hiatus wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depending on the team, a phone tree in twilio could do the trick, with calls made down the list if people do not pick up for escalation.

What happens when Twilio is down? Same questions for your email, sms and server. Part of the difficulty is guaranteed uptime and PagerDuty is rock solid in that regards.

Pager Duty uses Twilio.

Re: Cisco Acquires Splunk

#466

Post by thayne »

displaynone wrote: post #412
Corrado wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's super true of PagerDuty. It's a pretty good product and cheap when you only have a few people on it. However, the jump from the basic license to the next tier is HUGE and any add-ons you might need (ie. webhook triggers) bump the price up even more. Just having a simple monitoring solution with >10 people could cost you $100's a month. That said, every other product in this space is crap. I'm not sure why thou…

what's your take on xMatters?

My take on xmatters is that it gives you some building blocks to build a decent paging system, and has a fair amount of flexibility, but many things that work out of the box, or with a little bit of configuration in PagerDuty require a non-trivial amount of work in xmatters to set up. And you will likely run into limitations.

Re: Cisco Acquires Splunk

#467

Post by positr0n »

DylanDmitri wrote: post #253
petetnt wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's apparently cheaper to buy Splunk than to a buy Splunk license.

Microsoft’s “request for external license” form is one page long, and has a “how much would this company cost to acquire” section. Or so I’ve heard.

Seems like a bad idea from an anchoring perspective.

People buy $20 socks with a $300 suit because $20 seems inconsequential compared to the suit.

What's $90/mo compared to $50M to acquire them :-P

Re: Cisco Acquires Splunk

#468

Post by debarshri »

cliffcrosland wrote: post #446
debarshri wrote: post #94

Building splunk has become very democratised in today's day and age. Back in the day, logging, metrics, event collection etc. was a hard problem that they solved. Esp. when there weren't any simple distributed storage operators. They have been a cockroach in the orgs, surviving every downturn. As a dev, you might hate it, CISO and CIOs love it. Orgs, often mandate it. The way they dominated the market is via creating…

How do you think Splunk will fare as more companies move to public clouds? Seems unbeatable on-prem, which probably means that the company is a good match for Cisco.

On cloud, cloud providers have their own thing that is selling like hot cakes. But splunk has huge business on splunk cloud model too.

I know lot of cloud providers are also whitelabeling known products.

Re: Cisco Acquires Splunk

#469

Post by nameistaken »

qeternity wrote: post #424
DSingularity wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They lose 22,000$ This was insider trading.

This is an overly simplistic view of options trading. Let’s say I had a view that the stock was going to be volatile, more so than options implied, but didn’t have a directional view. I could buy the calls and short the stock and scalp my gamma during the move. Or let’s say I was short the stock and wanted to hedge during a volatile FOMC period.

You and I have vastly different definitions of 'overly simplistic'.

Scalping your gamma?

Feels like the stock market is just a bunch of jargon, subterfuge and financial sleight of hand. Like we learned nothing from 2008, and just created financial 'products' mechanisms and gambits out of thin air.

Stock shorting has got to be one of the most pants-on-head stupid things I've ever heard.

Well, next to gamma scalping.

Re: Cisco Acquires Splunk

#470

Post by mlyle »

nameistaken wrote: post #469
qeternity wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an overly simplistic view of options trading. Let’s say I had a view that the stock was going to be volatile, more so than options implied, but didn’t have a directional view. I could buy the calls and short the stock and scalp my gamma during the move. Or let’s say I was short the stock and wanted to hedge during a volatile FOMC period.

You and I have vastly different definitions of 'overly simplistic'. Scalping your gamma? Feels like the stock market is just a bunch of jargon, subterfuge and financial sleight of hand. Like we learned nothing from 2008, and just created financial 'products' mechanisms and gambits out of thin air. Stock shorting has got to be one of the most pants-on-head stupid things I've ever heard. Well, next to gamma scalping.

> Feels like the stock market is just a bunch of jargon, subterfuge and financial sleight of hand.

Here, what they're doing is establishing a position which will make money if the stock moves either direction out of a narrow band. If you believe there's going to be a big industry upset, but don't know whether it will hurt or harm a specific player, you might enter this position. In turn, the overall market volatility is reduced and liquidity is added by your information being added to the market.

> Stock shorting has got to be one of the most pants-on-head stupid things I've ever heard.

All kinds of simple, legitimate reasons to short stocks. E.g. you are excessively exposed to that company's welfare for some reason (stock options, they're an important vendor, they're a big component in a mutual fund you own but you'd rather not own their stock, etc)-- you can take an opposite position by shorting. Or, here, you can use it to offset an option that moves in the opposite direction.

> Like we learned nothing from 2008, and just created financial 'products' mechanisms and gambits out of thin air.

This isn't too much like the house of cards from 2008. These types of strategies are not new; offsetting short positions by writing or buying options was in frequent use in the 1970s, if not before. Option use to profit from volatility (or hedge volatility) dates back more than 2000 years.

I'm not a big fan of esoteric, complicated financial schemes, or in creating options and financialized products for everything (e.g. cap and trade)... or situations where market players profit from privileged access to marketplaces (e.g. HFT). But the things you name are not any of these.

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