Imagine you are a detective, and every device on your network — servers, laptops, firewalls, cloud systems — is leaving footprints everywhere. The problem is there are millions of footprints every single day, scattered across thousands of different files. Your job is to find the one set of footprints that does not belong. That is exactly the problem Splunk solves. It is the platform that collects every footprint from every device, puts them in one place, and gives you the tools to find the suspicious ones — fast. In this blog, I will take you through Splunk from absolute scratch — what it is, how it works under the hood, how to write SPL queries like a pro, how to build dashboards and alerts, how to set up a SOC lab, and most importantly, the interview questions you will definitely face if you are going for a SOC analyst role. I have completed the TryHackMe Advanced Splunk rooms including SPL exploration, SOC lab setup, dashboards and reports, data manipula...