Splunking Your Cryptocurrencies

A Story of Data, Bitcoin, and Other Cryptocurrencies

Trading Cryptocurrencies: Are You In?

If you’re part of the tech community, you’re probably pretty familiar with the concept of trading cryptocurrencies. If you’re new, we’ll give you a quick rundown—but first, we’re going to start by saying that while we think this is an interesting topic, we are not advising you to go out and start trading cryptocurrencies, nor are we endorsing any particular cryptocurrency or service. Trading is unpredictable and those who choose to do it are on their own, folks! That includes you.

All right, so a quick rundown on trading cryptocurrencies. According to finder.com, bitcoin (BTC) grew from $997.69/BTC to $9,718/BTC between January and November 2017. Needless to say, that’s pretty significant growth, which means market trading is on the rise. But what is it, and why are people so interested?

Trading cryptocurrencies is similar to the concept of the stock market. In essence, currency that you own is exchanged into another type of currency and exchanged back when the price changes for a profit. For example, let's say that you decided to start investing in Bitcoin yesterday and wanted to invest $500. You buy the Bitcoin from a platform like coinbase.com and buy $500 worth. At the time of purchase, the Bitcoin value is $6,166.23, so $500 will get you 0.08108682 BTC. Then, you see that the price of Bitcoin rose from yesterday to today and decide you want to sell it. The current value for Bitcoin is $8,228.37, so your 0.08108682 BTC is now worth $667.21. Simply click to sell the BTC back to USD and you’ve made $167.21 in 1 day.

Then there are types of trading. Also similar to the stock market, there’s long-term and short-term. Long-term traders keep the cryptocurrencies they purchase for long periods of time. Short-term trading is more focused on taking advantage of rapid price swings, and purchases are made quickly—over a day, or even just a few hours. Different people prefer to take advantage of unique aspects of each method.

The point is, online currency exchanges and trading platforms make it pretty easy for just about anyone to participate and gain profit from market trading, and we’ve figured out a customizable way to get real-time feedback and data on cryptocurrencies into one dashboard.

Splunking Your Bitcoin (Or Ether, Litecoin, and other Cryptocurrencies)

So here’s where it gets interesting. In order to actively trade cryptocurrency, one must use a website or application in order to monitor the market. There are a few tools that allow you to do this, but a few of us Splunk engineers here at ASE decided to build custom dashboards and use Splunk for the very same purpose.

Why use Splunk? Splunk gives us the ability to collect any type of data, correlate and analyze across the different data sources, report on the analysis done, and display the results on an easy to view dashboard continuously producing results in real time.

Select any of the top 100 Cryptocurrencies listed on coinmarketcap.com to start monitoring within Splunk

Here’s how it works: download and install the app, navigate to your data inputs and view your rest API inputs. On this page, you will see a comprehensive list of the top 100 cryptocurrencies. Customization options are what making using Spunk different; once you’re in, you can simply enable or disable any cryptocurrency you’re interested in keeping track of. Every 5 seconds, Splunk reaches out and indexes and stores the latest information about the cryptocurrency (including the latest value), and even that function is customizable. If frequent outreach puts too much pressure on your system, it’s easy to choose longer intervals. On the flip side, if you’re truly looking for real time analytics into your cryptocurrency portfolio, change the interval to every 1 second.

Using Splunk as a way to watch your cryptocurrencies gives you an overview of all the selections you enable, sorted by ranking, name, market cap, current price, 24-hour volume that’s been traded, circulating supply, and change over the last 24 hours. Green indicates positive upward trends and red indicates negative downward trends.

If you’re investing in cryptocurrencies, you can easily use Spunk to help you decide whether it’s a good time to buy or sell.

Select any of the cryptocurrencies you're monitoring to see an in depth analysis of it

Ready to take it to the next step? Besides monitoring the latest values of cryptocurrencies in real time, you can even upload a CSV file that includes cryptocurrencies you’ve bought, how much you paid for them, and how much of that cryptocurrency you now own. Correlating across different data sources to see your entire portfolio and how much you’ve made is easy, too. On the ‘Portfolio’ dashboard within the app, you can view how much you’ve invested, total value, and total profit, with detailed breakdowns included.

Could we possibly take this even one step further? Since we’re storing information about the cryptocurrencies every few seconds, we can use the historical data to allow Splunk to apply one of it’s 6 different algorithms for predictive analysis, giving you a prediction on the cryptocurrency price/value in the future, or even a forecast of what all your crypto currencies value will be in a week or even a month ahead.

My Portfolio Dashboard: Shows you how much you've invested and calculated your total profit, along with the breakdown of each.
This dashboard continues to display your portfolio in real time.

Curious About the Unique Ways You Can Use Splunk? We’ve Got Some Ideas.

Like we said, we’re not cryptocurrency trading advisors. Just a bunch of Splunk enthusiasts who figured out a cool way to check out market data that has more customization options than the other tools out there. We Splunked our car once, too. We haven’t been planning on releasing the app in the app store, but we’re seeing a growing interest as we’ve shared our progress. If you’re interested in how we pulled this together or have questions about Splunking your cryptocurrencies and trading ventures, let’s chat! We can get you a copy of the app.

Have other questions about Splunk? To get more details, call us at (301)-838-9470.

Free eBook: Top 3 Unique Splunk Integrations

How Insight Engines, Recorded Future, and Splunk ES Can Increase the Value of Your Splunk Practice and Improve Your Security Posture