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Big thanks to Cisco & Splunk for sponsoring my trip to .Conf 2026 and also for sponsoring this video.
What happens when shooting an enemy in a Doom game deletes a real Kubernetes pod? Splunk built a Doom clone that does exactly that, then tracks the chaos in live dashboards. In this video, Heath shows me Metric Mayhem, a Doom-style game connected to a live e-commerce demo application running on Kubernetes. Enemies represent pods in the application, so playing the game creates real failures for Splunk to monitor.
We also look at Trace Invaders, Splunk’s take on Space Invaders, and how Chaos Mesh adds CPU stress, memory stress, and latency to the environment. Heath explains how the team captures game events as logs and turns them into dashboards showing deleted pods, player scores, boss defeats, and finish times.
In this video: How game enemies map to Kubernetes pods
What happens in the demo when a pod is deleted and replaced How Chaos Mesh introduces stress and latency How Splunk Observability Cloud shows the impact on the application How game logs power Splunk dashboards and leaderboards Why an interactive game makes a monitoring demo easier to understand
If you’re learning Kubernetes, chaos engineering, or observability, this is a fun way to see how failures become useful data. Would you try this in your own test lab? Let me know in the comments.
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// MENU // 0:00 – Introduction 0:29 – Why Splunk Built a Video Game 01:03 – “DOOM” and Trace Invaders 01:45 – Chaos Engineering with Chaos Mesh 02:26 – Splunk Observability Cloud 03:27 – How the Game Was Created 04:24 – The Splunk Gaming Dashboard 05:18 – How Game Data Gets Into Splunk 05:41 – Gamifying Splunk 06:17 – What Data Can Splunk Ingest? 06:30 – What Does “Being Splunky” Mean? 07:12 – Gaming Chaos Meets Business Value 07:24 – Monitoring Kubernetes Metrics 07:47 – Building Custom Splunk Dashboards
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Disclaimer: This video is for educational purposes only.
