Ten Years of PowerConnect: A Decade Building on Splunkbase
This article was authored by Seth Marek, PowerConnect’s Lead Splunk Developer at RHONDOS.
Exploring Splunk’s annual .Conf some years ago, a colleague approached me with a bug that slipped through testing for our latest Splunk app release. A quick exchange of details later, I weaved my way across the vast expo floor to one of the many lounge areas, flipped open my laptop, replicated the issue, and released a fix on Splunkbase in within the hour. In retrospect, it had been the perfect opportunity to test improvements to our Splunk app release pipeline.
With Splunk celebrating twenty years of Splunkbase this month, I did the math and realized that - marking our first release in May 2016 - PowerConnect’s Splunk app has now lived on Splunkbase for half of the marketplace’s lifetime. Ten years - that is a decade of releases, customer feedback, .Conf hallway conversations, and more JavaScript edits than any normal person should ever have to see.
When I first used the app as a customer several years ago, we were still only just discovering what was possible when you crack open the infamous black box of SAP. I remember feeling overwhelmed with the sheer variety and volume of data that I could find from a single SAP system. Every use case was an opportunity to learn more about how this data could empower other teams in the organization with critical monitoring - assuming you knew who to send the email alert to!
Since then, a lot has changed: I now build that same Splunk app, supporting a global install base while constantly evolving how RHONDOS can bring valuable insights to customers where they need it most.
From a Connector to a Platform Citizen
PowerConnect started as a focused idea: get SAP's uniquely stubborn telemetry into Splunk. ABAP runtime data, work process metrics, IDocs, tRFCs, batch jobs, and business transactions - anything you could imagine from the SAP backend - all with timestamps and structures that Splunk could read into powerful visualizations. Ten years ago, that was a hard problem that few people were even attempting. SAP was the beating heart of the business and, at the same time, its single largest blind spot.
In its first year the PowerConnect Splunk app was a modest set of dashboards to complement our data collection core. Today it covers custom functionality and hundreds of use cases captured across ECC, S/4HANA, BW, and HANA. We build content for the way real SAP teams work - often providing a few different versions of the same dashboard if it means the customer may find one useful! Splunk's own framing in the article rings true from where I sit: the hardest problems in observability are not solved by one team alone but by many teams, each bringing a slightly different view of what "success" looks like.
We took that same model to heart with our app, bringing more data out of SAP into the Splunk platform, with rich capabilities allowing customers to monitor the health of their SAP landscapes and identify issues as they appear. As a Splunk app developer, this commitment takes many forms; sometimes I spend months working on building something as carefully as possible to maximize benefit to the most customers. Other times I end up huddling with one of our solution specialists just outside a busy conference room and assisting a customer over a virtual meeting!
Splunk App Development: What it Takes
Working full time as a Splunk app developer can be an oddly specific craft, and it is not quite what people assume from the outside. Maybe your app has a few saved searches, some data transformations, and a couple of dashboards, but Splunk app development can evolve into full-blown software that has to behave inside someone else's mission-critical environment, follow the platform's conventions, and earn the trust of admins (most of whom have been burned before)! It helps to keep a few things in mind.
The top 3 things to know about being a Splunk app developer
Know your audience. “Who is this for?” Is your new dashboard intended as an information-rich readout for a technical user or a glass table for an executive? The PowerConnect Splunk app is commonly used by SAP BASIS experts needing quick access to data for root cause analysis, but our dashboards often end up on control center screens and in front of management. I have learned over the years to respect the power of colors. They are one of the easiest ways to grab attention, but in the wrong context, they can imply the existence of a problem that may not be there!
Show some restraint. Splunk contains incredible capabilities for processing data and providing rapid retrieval of critical information. However, not every report needs acceleration. Customers want to maximize the value of their Splunk deployment, but how and where you provide that value is important. In the SAP business, we know that every customer’s SAP landscape and core use cases are different. Carefully consider the content that significantly impacts the performance of a customer’s Splunk implementation; you may want to ship it “turned off” first and let the customer decide if it is important.
Ship, listen, and let customers co-design. The roadmap that matters may not be what we assumed in a planning meeting; it was the one our customers wrote for us through support tickets, feature requests, and the occasional blunt video call. Publish, pay attention, and treat every piece of feedback as a gift - even the ones that sting.
The Next Ten Years
The ground is shifting again, and in a familiar direction. The customer needs to be able sort through data and find insights faster than ever. AI-assisted operations are still in their early stages as customers grapple with ever-evolving models and (perhaps more critically) data privacy requirements. The next decade of PowerConnect’s Splunk app is about a first-class, insight-driven source of context for the humans and the agents investigating complex SAP landscapes. We cannot wait to show you what is ahead.
Finally, to the Splunkbase team: thank you for building the front door. To the builders across the ecosystem who turned hard-won experience into software other people could use - you know who you are - thank you for the example. And to everyone standing at the start of their own app: the best ones still begin the same way ours did, with someone close to a painful problem saying, "There has to be a better way."
Here's to the next ten years.
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