GPS tracking with splunk> ?

splunk> (splunk.com) has the option to graph geographic data on a map with GPS data.
When you want to use splunk> to trace your route it is not possible out of the box but you can use some CSS and JS magic to do that part, too.

I use GPS tracking devices in all my family cars. For viewing the routes I use the great Open Source OpenGTS tool (opengts.org) which is based on tomcat and Java which both are reasons why I do NOT want it. As there are no other usable tools out there I started using splunk> for tracking my GPS data.

My first approach was to keep my OpenGTS server which parses the GPS data and monitoring it’s log to display everything in splunk>, too.

The result looks promising as I’m able to display all GPS devices with their geo data and some goodies like speed. When you click on a line in the table the map will be updated to show only that geo point – very nice if you want to find out where you were at a specific date and time.

screenshot_001

Besides that you can choose the time range by predefined values or by splunk> syntax (“-2w” etc).
You can also choose from all GPS devices or specific ones which are defined in OpenGTS and will be auto-added in the tagging box.
Based on that an average speed and a maximum speed will be displayed and of course the map adjusted.

screenshot_002

Ok as you can see this is a first version only. The trace between the way points are not there and the pie charts need to be adjusted that they show only 1 gps info.

I wrote a splunk TA for this and a splunk App which contains the map etc and will post when it is ready to use.

While I have done all that stuff the wish grows getting rid of the OpenGTS part. It looks ugly, works well but I don’t like to have another server running especially when it uses JAVA.. So … why not using a splunk> Universal Forwarder to get data in directly – without OpenGTS?

Yes! That’s what I’m currently working on. I’m already able to get the data in – for this I heavily changed my above mentioned TA and App and there are first successes.

I get data from my TK10X devices and currently tuning my sourcetypes to get those and all devices using the standard “GPRMC”! It looks very promising so stay tuned it may replaces OpenGTS for you ;-) (I will never implement things like SMS send/receive etc like OpenGTS does so if you need this you need to stay there)

All the best :-)