Managed Enterprise Platform: Delivering Mission-Critical Observability with Splunk

This is a guest blog post from Cesar DeLeon, Senior Security Consulting Manager for Accenture Federal Services.

Learn how Accenture Federal Services partnered with Splunk to deliver a comprehensive observability solution for one of America's largest federal financial agencies, enabling them to focus on mission-critical applications while ensuring operational excellence through enhanced monitoring, automation, and self-healing capabilities.​

The Challenge

One of America's largest federal financial agencies was looking for a way to manage infrastructure and web services that minimized the focus on infrastructure operations, allowing them to direct their energy towards designing applications that better serve America's citizens and the nation's financial partner institutions. The agency needed a solution that could support both legacy systems and modern cloud technologies while providing comprehensive visibility across their complex IT landscape. With over 100 mission critical applications hosted and interconnected with other agencies, the organization required robust monitoring capabilities to ensure service reliability, especially during seasonal fluctuations when application traffic patterns vary significantly.​

What We Did

At Accenture Federal we implemented a Managed Service Platform (MSP) that delivers a fully hybrid infrastructure stack, using the latest available technologies in the data center and in the cloud. The platform is flexible enough to host legacy server-based systems while also allowing the government to use the latest available cloud technologies, giving them a place to design, test, build, and deploy modernized applications. At the core of this solution, Accenture Federal leveraged Splunk Enterprise as the central observability engine to monitor and maintain operational excellence across the environment. By capturing application and infrastructure data from the entire MSP environment, the platform enables holistic visibility into the health state of all applications.​

​The implementation included several key Splunk components:​

• Splunk Enterprise for comprehensive monitoring and incident management across all layers of the IT stack​​
• Splunk IT Service Intelligence (ITSI) to leverage machine learning capabilities for understanding normal behavior patterns for seasonal and variable traffic
• ​Splunk SOAR for implementing self-healing capabilities that automate common remediation tasks​
• AppDynamics for application performance monitoring to trace business transactions and discover application topology​
• Splunk Enterprise Security to protect the agency's data from cyber threats and support compliance with federal security requirements​​

The solution enables administrators to identify incidents, pinpoint areas for improvement, and minimize service disruption by quickly identifying application error conditions and viewing anomalies in near real-time..​​

Our Differentiators

Self-healing automation: The team built automated functions powered by Splunk SOAR to self-remediate common infrastructure conditions. After identifying the most frequent alerts requiring administrator response, the team developed playbooks that execute automatically when these conditions trigger. This innovation has achieved a 90% reduction in remediation time, with hundreds of incidents resolved without human intervention.​

FinOps integration: By combining machine metrics and cloud financial data, we developed custom dashboards that allow the FinOps team to identify capacity under and over-utilization. This capability enables the team to work directly with agency stakeholders to right-size application workloads, resulting in tangible cost savings for the government.

​Enhanced security posture: Our extensive experience with federal government systems brings deep industry knowledge to shape Splunk Enterprise Security capabilities to the agency's specific needs. The security implementations support monitoring of fraud analytics and help meet OMB-21-31 requirements for enhanced cybersecurity event logging.​

Outcomes & Value Delivered

The Splunk-powered Managed Service Platform has delivered significant value to the agency:

• Improved operational efficiency through centralized monitoring and automated incident response​​
• 90% reduction in remediation time for common infrastructure issues through self-healing capabilities​
• Enhanced collaboration between teams as visibility gaps were reduced​
• ​Cost optimization through right-sizing of cloud resources based on FinOps insights​
• Accelerated compliance with federal security requirements and audit mandates​
• Freed agency resources to focus on application development rather than infrastructure management​

​As Accenture Federal and Splunk continue to partner, the future roadmap includes leveraging Splunk's latest built-in Artificial Intelligence add-ons and Machine Learning capabilities, as well as extending Accenture's Agentic AI platforms to further help the agency realize operational streamlining, cost reduction, and meet policy mandates.

About the Author Cesar Deleon is a Senior Security Delivery Manager at Accenture Federal Services, where he has spent over 11 years leading cybersecurity and observability initiatives for one of the nation’s largest federal financial agencies. He has played a key role in designing and managing a comprehensive observability solution that enhances visibility, resilience, and operational efficiency across complex federal environments.