The old way: Tracing email is time-consuming and complicated.

Email the most mission-critical application for any organization today, yet the war on spammers, phishers and hackers has taken its toll on the reliability and availability of email systems. Help desks are inundated with requests to track down lost messages. Marketing campaigns are thwarted by delivery problems. Complicated mail security, transfer and delivery architectures suffer from elusive configuration and performance problems. And because of the difficulty of analyzing logs, metrics and configuration data from so many components, a few senior admins usually become the bottleneck for tracing these many types of email delivery issues.

The new way: IT Search yields fast answers to email questions.

Splunk indexes all of the IT data generated by every component of the messaging infrastructure — activity logs, configurations and metrics from mail transfer and delivery agents, mail security applications, firewalls, network devices and operating systems. Knowledgeable users can define transactions to correlate events from different components and set up saved form searches. These transactions and saved searches empower frontline staff to answer routine questions. Administrators can also easily review messaging activity and set up alerts to proactively identify problems such as queue overflows.