Splunk at Autodesk

Enhanced Insight Leads to Fast ROI, Better Service

The Business

Every Oscar®-winning movie for Best Visual Effects for the past 15 years was created with the help of Autodesk software. Media and entertainment software is just one segment of the Autodesk product portfolio. The San Rafael, Calif., firm, through its 1,900 global resellers, also serves the architecture, engineering, construction, automotive, manufacturing and government markets. Autodesk's 6,800 employees are dedicated to meeting the needs of more than 10 million customers in 185 countries. Splunk is helping Autodesk's IT and business users to solve infrastructure challenges faster and more effectively--and to deliver better customer service as a result.

Challenges

For nearly 30 years, Autodesk has been a pioneer in software development as well as an active acquirer of promising new technology with more than two dozen acquisitions to its credit. In 2005, the strategic decision was made to outsource the management of its IT infrastructure to managed service providers (MSPs). While outsourcing achieved many goals it also introduced new challenges for the firm.

The continued strong growth, new product development and the intake and integration of acquired products and operations placed tremendous pressure on the Autodesk Enterprise Information Services (EIS) group. They needed to find new ways to improve visibility across the enterprise and siloed technology stacks, monitor service level agreement (SLA) performance and accelerate error ID and resolution.

Enter Splunk

Autodesk system architect Steve Litras discovered Splunk in 2007. His group manages development and QA for key landscapes, including SAP, Siebel, TIBCO and Java applications. The team needed a way to find, correlate and resolve errors occurring across more than a 1,000 Windows/Linux/Solaris servers; increase visibility into MSPs; support a "next generation" MSP data center; and accelerate security incident investigation and resolution. Today, Splunk is used regularly by 35 Autodesk EIS power users and 15 business-unit users.

Operations Management

Splunk is playing a key role in enabling Autodesk to create a single view across its critical applications, including ERP, CRM and Web services. Splunk has become the tool that is allowing the firm to crack the MSP black box and measure critical metrics and SLA performance. Splunk is helping Autodesk to create a closer partnership with its MSPs, including file change monitoring, automatic ticket generation and SLA-impacting events.

Security and Compliance

Sensitive private information contained in some logs poses a security and compliance challenge. Splunk helps the EIS security team find and resolve security issues in a fraction of the time. What once took weeks or months can now be resolved in a day or less using Splunk generated views and dashboards.

Breakthroughs

Many Autodesk business users benefit from Splunk via pre-written applications created by the EIS team. Autodesk marketing groups use a Splunk application to track the progress of email campaigns, targeting current and prospective users. A typical campaign may involve 200,000 or more emails. Before Splunk, an admin would spend half a day or more manually sifting through data and correlating information, followed by a detailed analysis that took up to a week. A Splunk email application now gives the marketing groups real-time information on their campaigns, enabling them to evaluate click-through rates, and determine the source of errors such as incorrect addresses and server throttling issues.

Security issues have been a key driver for Splunk expansion at Autodesk. The EIS group has used Splunk to cut its mean time to isolate (MTTI) and mean time to resolve/restore (MTTR) by up to 80% using Weblog and traffic log data to solve a variety of security mysteries. Autodesk is extending the success it has had with Splunk even deeper into its security infrastructure with the implementation of Splunk Enterprise Security Suite (ESS). The firm will use ESS to further correlate system performance information with security data. The Autodesk security team has long been deterred by the cost and complexity of other SEM systems. With Splunk already in use, it was just a matter of repurposing information the firm was already collecting.

The EIS team uses Splunk and XML accelerator syslogs to report on transaction latency impacting customer and partner access. Customer service representatives now use Splunk dashboards to diagnose problems with the firm's single sign-on system, which is based on WebSphere and Tivoli Access and Identity Manager. Splunk enables the firm to monitor login failures and proactively reach out to customers, thereby heading off the "bad experience curve," according Litras.

Litras estimates that it took just six months for Splunk to pay for itself. Autodesk's Splunk ROI can be attributed to many factors, including the time savings to identify, isolate and resolve a wide range of infrastructure challenges; the positive impact on customer service; downtime reduction; and enhanced visibility into MSP services.