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By Martin La Monica, 3 April 2006 11:50

NEWS

A US start-up called Splunk is setting up a public collaborative website, or wiki, for IT professionals who hunt down system glitches.

Splunk is today expected to launch a commercial version of a hosted service called Splunk Base, which aims to be the equivalent of an online encyclopaedia, like Wikipedia, but for technology administrators.

Splunk Base is a hosted wiki where system administrators can post information on errors they encounter while running data centres. A database administrator, for example, might report a problem that often occurs when setting up an Oracle database to run with Apache Web server.

The system, which is available for free, allows administrators to tag, or label, their entries so other users can more quickly find solutions to their system woes. The company name is a play on "spelunking", or cave exploration.

Splunk's other product, released late last year, is an on-premise server application that allows administrators to view and search through log file information to speed up troubleshooting.

Michael Baum, CEO of Splunk, said the idea to develop better tools for system adminstrators came from his previous jobs at Yahoo! and other ecommerce companies.

"We spent a lot of time keeping our systems running, and I saw our people spending a lot of their time looking through log files," which Baum said is complex and time-consuming.

Efforts have been made to standardise log information into a single format that, in theory, will help system administrators pinpoint problems quicker. As part of its autonomic computing initiative, IBM published a common log file reporting format.

Baum said that enticing device and software vendors to standardize on that format is "ludicrous," in part because of the effort involved. Also, he noted that new products come to market quickly, so adhering to a single format is tricky.