Splunk for IT Operations Breakout Session

Editor's Notes

• #2: Welcome to SplunkLive [City]. Thank you for taking the time to attend today’s event.
• #8: Company Background: Vodafone Group Plc is the world's leading mobile telecommunications company, providing a wide range of services including voice and data communications. Paulo Carvalho works in Vodafone's DSSL group supports Vodafone live! Which includes popular mobile video, news, music and other services. Paulo is the Services Network Manager at Vodafone Portugal and is responsible for all services on top of GSM Network, MMS, SMS, Voice Mail, Unified Messaging, streaming, Mobile Portal, VAS Services, Prepaid Services. Other Notes: Vodafone uses Splunk for application troubleshooting and management of services they offer over their 3G network. The environment is complex, with many services being offered, running on many platforms and servers - Solaris, Redhat Linux and introducing virtualized environments. They also have a huge Java and J2EE infrastructure and often need to search quickly for errors or exceptions occurring within the last sixty minutes. Vodafone has been a successful user of Splunk realizing significant material benefits. They have also moved to a proactive phase with Splunk, using it to monitor IT data such as threshold levels for specific systems, and fixing issues before they become visible to their customers.
• #9: So how does Splunk help? We offer a powerful, end-to-end, real-time platform for Machine Data. Splunk can collect data from any source, giving our customers real-time visibility and intelligence into what’s happening across the IT infrastructure – whether it’s physical, virtual or in the cloud.
• #10: Splunk’s highly capable platform for machine data can handle any machine generated data from any location and any source – without the need to transform the data to fit a schema, without the need for custom connectors-because unlike most other tools on the market, Splunk does not have a database backend. Splunk’s proprietary map-reduce based high speed index and retrieval system allows management of very large quantities of data at scale with just commodity x86 servers.
• #11: The result of using Splunk for all types of machine data results in enormous benefits to the IT organization as a whole. With data from all tiers of applications and hardware infrastructure in a single central location, customers benefit not just from faster troubleshooting and analysis –but from increasing value as they progress along the ‘maturity model’ . Customers use Splunk and their machine data across IT and the business to gain Operational Intelligence. Operational Intelligence refers to the new levels of visibility and intelligence you gain by harnessing the vast amounts of machine data directly from the systems that support IT and the business. Remember how our CIOs are faced with the challenges of silo-ed tools and having lots of sources of data in non-standard formats. With Splunk, they can start to go up the maturity ladder. Stage 1 is “search and investigate”. In this stage, customers use data in Splunk to find and fix problems dramatically faster across their organization using IT data. You can think of it as finding that “needle in the haystack”, or “multiple needles in multiple haystacks”. Just by effectively harnessing this data, customers have experienced up to 70% improvements in mean time to identify and resolve issues. This alone removes much of the human latency experienced “in the trenches”. Stage 2 is Proactive Monitoring: Turn any root cause analyses into proactive alerts to prevent the same issues from impacting your infrastructure. Find any patterns across different types of data to fill visibility gaps and proactively adapt monitoring to identify issues before they impact customers and services. Systems that used to experience outages have remained running because of implementation of this approach. Macy’s is an excellent example of this concept. They have had 100% up-time for the macys.com site for two straight seasons even with a 50% increase in transactions. Stage 3 is Operational Visibility. Customers gain end-to-end visibility to track and deliver on IT KPIs and make better-informed IT decisions. Rolling up visibility to align it to IT KPIs (how IT is measured by the business) provides unprecedented intelligence to the NOC and senior IT personnel. Being able to spot SLA infractions in real time, or measure utilization as new services are launched enables IT to meet and exceed its objectives. Finally, stage 4 is about delivering business insight - gain insight from operational data to make better-informed business decision. Combining and correlating machine-generated IT data with business data provides unique business insights. Watching the consumption of new online services by channel or demographics. Combining telecoms call records with tariff databases to get a real time view of revenue and 3rd party charges. There is a diverse set of cases where surfacing machine-generated IT data provides operational intelligence to the business.
• #16: Remember we said before, that Splunk is a “platform” for machine data? Splunk has evolved over the years from an engine for any kind of machine data to a robust platform, complete with a REST API, 6 different SDKs and numerous “apps” that sit on top of Splunk and provide out of the box value from your data. These “apps” are available on Splunkbase and they accelerate getting g data into Splunk and getting pre-built visualizations for that data. Note that these apps are not like connectors because they don’t lock away the data in a silo or restrict its usage to particular sets of views – the data is in Splunk and can be used side by side with any other data in Splun k. You can move dashboards and key indicators across apps or customize them in any way you want. Apps make it faster to get value out of your data and several key apps provide new visibility into areas that were formerly “black box” in the infrastructure – such as the virtualization apps. We also recently introduced the 2 new offerings – one to collect wire data, with the Splunk App for Stream (stemming from the acquisition of Cloudmeter) and MINT (Mobile Intelligence) that stems from our acquisition of Bugsense. The Splunk App for Stream enables the capture of real-time streaming wire data, which is the data transmitted between applications over the network. It enables visibility into application, business and user activity without the need for instrumentation, enhancing various operational use cases across IT, security and the business. And Splunk MINT helps you gain visibility into mobile app performance and quality, so you can deliver better mobile apps Splunk MINT helps you combine and correlate mobile app data with other data in Splunk so you can pinpoint problems faster and analyze user experience/behavior across mobile, desktop and web channels. The main value from the apps is providing context for data from silos and making it available inside Splunk for correlation with other data from other silos. In addition to prebuilt apps, customers can also build their own. What have developers been building using Splunk Enterprise? Examples include the following: Run searches and retrieve Splunk data from existing Customer Service/Call Center applications (Comcast use case) Integrate Splunk data into existing BI tools and dashboard (Tableau, MS Excel) Build mobile applications with KPI dashboards and alerts powered by Splunk (Otto Group use case) Log directly to Splunk from remote devices (Bosch use cases) Build customer-facing dashboards powered by user-specific data in Splunk (Socialize, Hurricane Labs use cases) Programmatically extract data from Splunk for long-term data warehousing We hope this is just the beginning. We hope to open up a whole new world of enterprise apps.