Hi, my name is

Brent McKinney

I build O11y solutions :D

Sr. Consultant & Team Lead with 7 years of experience designing enterprise monitoring architectures & leading technical teams.

View My Work Get In Touch
brent@portfolio ~ %

$ cat about.txt

Name: Brent McKinney

Role: Sr. Splunk Consultant & Team Lead

Location: Atlanta, GA

Experience: 7 years

Focus: Observability | Python | Cloud

$ _

01. About Me

I'm a Sr. Consultant & Team Lead based in Georgia, where I've spent the last 7 years helping enterprises gain visibility into their systems through Splunk and Observability solutions.

My tech journey started in 2015 as a Computer Science student Georgia State University and grew into deep expertise in distributed architectures, APM, Kubernetes monitoring, and all things Observability.

Now I'm expanding my toolkit by exploring modern DevOps practices with Python, and looking for opportunities where I can bring my operational expertise to more hands-on technical roles.

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02. Experience

Team Lead

Aug 2022 - present

TekStream Solutions • Atlanta, GA

  • Lead a team of consultants delivering Splunk solutions for enterprise clients
  • Architect distributed Splunk deployments handling terabytes of daily data ingestion
  • Design and implement APM & RUM solutions for containerized apps on Kubernetes
  • Mentor junior team members and drive best practices across multiple engagements

Sr. Splunk Consultant

Jan 2022

TekStream Solutions • Atlanta, GA

  • Delivered end-to-end Splunk implementations for clients across industries
  • Built complex SPL searches, dashboards, and alerting workflows
  • Configured data inputs, forwarders, and heavy forwarder pipelines
  • Developed Python-based scripted inputs and custom commands

Splunk Consultant

Jun 2019

TekStream Solutions • Atlanta, GA

  • Supported senior consultants on Splunk deployment projects
  • Created dashboards, reports, and data models for client environments
  • Earned Splunk certifications and developed core platform expertise

03. Skills & Tools

◆ Splunk & Observability

  • Splunk Enterprise
  • Splunk ITSI
  • Splunk Observability
  • OpenTelemetry & Instrumentation for distributed Tracing
  • Prometheus

◆ Programming & Scripting

  • Python
  • REST APIs
  • Regular Expressions
  • Git & Version Control

◆ Cloud & Infrastructure

  • AWS
  • Azure
  • GCP
  • Docker -> Kubernetes
  • Linux Administration
  • Developing with CI/CD Pipelines

◆ Leadership & Consulting

  • Technical Team Leadership
  • Client Engagement
  • Architecture Reviews
  • Technical Documentation
  • Mentoring & Training
  • Agile / Scrum

04. Projects

📁
GitHub

AWS Health Scripts for Splunk

Python tool for collecting service level AWS metrics. Utilizing RSS feeds to collect AWS Health Dashboard status & DNS calls to check resolution to regional service endpoints. Data collected is converted to metric points for Splunk ingestion.

Python AWS DNS RSS Monitoring
📁
GitHub

Splunk ETL Normalization Tool

Python ETL tool that normalizes, validates, and dedups JSON objects into clean log entries.

Python ETL Splunk
🚀

More to come!

Check back or visit my GitHub for the latest.

Coming Soon

05. Blog

Oct 2023

Splunk DR/HA Architecture in AWS at TekStream

A comprehensive architecture for implementing Disaster Recovery in Splunk Enterprise running on AWS, via multi-site SmartStore indexer clusters, and a single search head cluster stretched across two AWS regions.

Read More →
Feb 2022

Expert Guide on the ITSI Rules Engine

A guide on using & troubleshooting the ITSI Rules Engine: The system responsible for processing & grouping notable events.

Read More →
Oct 2023

Dynamic Field names in Splunk

Learn how extract & use field names AND values using props & transforms within Splunk.

Read More →
May 2023

Smarter Whitelisting for Forwarder Deployments in Splunk

Learn how to utilize files for filtering on deployment clients in Splunk.

Read More →
Aug 2021

Using ITSI Summary and Pseudo Entities for custom Health Scores

A guide on building health score from private teams & utilizing pseudo entities within ITSI.

Read More →
Jun 2020

A guide to Subsearching in Splunk Enterprise

Learn how to correlate data sets in Splunk via subsearching!

Read More →

06. Get In Touch

Let's connect!
Whether you have a role in mind, a project to collaborate on, or just want to chat about O11y & Python, my inbox is open.

Say Hello