Building a real time dashboard in Splunk

Over 4 days I worked on a dashboard in Splunk, in hope that it would help the DrDoctor team progress in their work. Businesses use Splunk to search, monitor, analyse and visualize machine data. My objective was to create a dashboard full of statistical data including the reschedules, reminders and logins daily that the team could view and work from.

I brought together the number of Primary and Secondary messages sent out to clients of the NHS. This allowed problems to be visible to the team, for example a sending reminders error is now clearly visible.

Then by expanding off just these single figures, I worked on a graph that showed the messages sent over the last week. To develop this I implemented a graph that reflects the previous week with the present, this way the team could easily spot trends and patterns (E.g. less messages being sent on the weekends).

The creation of these graphs and figures gave me the experience of working with a search string, which includes certain commands  that form together to make a process take place creating a figure and graph. These commands are a perfect reflection of coding and therefore developed my understanding of what goes on behind the screen. I have set up my dashboard, running from a RaspberryPi with a screen in centre of a wall in the room for all to see as seen below.

In conclusion, these 4 days of work experience have given me a better understanding about handling and separate large amounts of data and statistics. In addition and most importantly this has placed me into a working atmosphere that circulates around one group of people acting as a team. This team is represented by their structure and the way they have laid out the week and days. An example is at 10:00 am every morning there is stand-up, which includes each member of the team explaining what they did on the previous day and what they are going to do.

Conrad joined DrDoctor for 4 days just after finishing his GSCEs to learn about being a software developer. He went from zero knowledge to a very impressive finished project!