Splunking Beat Saber!
At Splunk Live! London March 2020, we showed an interesting demonstration on how a game of Beat Saber in VR can be Splunked.
The video demonstrates Splunk’s ability to take data in from anywhere and anything that can produce a data stream, including for fun! There are of course use cases out there where getting data from games could be invaluable, such as global Esports competitions and other worldwide gaming events — and Splunk can be a great fit for that.
But how was this achieved?
Well, if you’d like to try this at home, here are the high-level steps I took to create this:
- Find a suitable game, VR or otherwise! Not all games out there are of course going to be suitable, and you need a game that will produce a data stream for Splunk.
Beat Saber was perfect for us, as it has lots of stats available to it, and it’s a fun and competitive game to demonstrate some of Splunk’s capabilities.
- Configure the game to produce data. In Beat Saber, we needed to use a game “mod” freely available for use, but many games will also have a telemetry output built in.
The mod we used was HTTP Status, available from Github at https://github.com/opl-/beatsaber-http-status. Modding Beat Saber is fairly straight forward, there are many tutorials out there that will guide you through this process step by step such as this https://bsaber.com/installing-the-mod-guide-necessary-for-any-custom-songs/
- Configure Splunk to ingest this data stream
A simple Python script was required for us to get this data — Our script if you’d like to try this is here. However, if you are getting data from a different game, you’ll be pleased to know Splunk supports a wide variety of data inputs.
- Then, create Splunk searches and dashboards to your heart’s content and show off something cool!
Our dashboard code for Beat Saber is available here.
All in all, this was completed in just 1 day. Whatever the use case is, whether it’s just for a bit of fun or to meet an important business use case, Splunk is a very powerful tool and flexible. Get data in from anywhere!
Credits:
Our demonstration at Splunk Live! and the video/steps provided in this blog was possible thanks to the HTTP Status mod for Beat Saber, which was used under the MIT License
MIT License
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