By optimizing our development and work processes, Splunk is playing a key role in enhancing our website quality, raising customer satisfaction and reducing complexity throughout our cloud transformation.
CAINZ Improves Web Performance by 800% While Overcoming Multicloud Complexity
Key Challenges
To implement a new business-boosting digital strategy, CAINZ needed to fully monitor e-commerce operations and website performance across various microservices in a multicloud architecture.
Key Results
The Splunk platform gives CAINZ data-driven observability that streamlines service monitoring and accelerates issue detection — leading to an eightfold improvement in performance.
A successful cloud journey relies on observability.
A leading home improvement retailer with over 220 stores in Japan, CAINZ CORPORATION (CAINZ) wanted to implement a digital strategy that would deliver superior customer experience. In addition to bringing system development in-house, CAINZ began to move its e-commerce sites — comprising more than 20 web services — to a multicloud environment. But this transition quickly made monitoring frontend performance more complicated, since heterogeneous web service platforms like Salesforce, Google Cloud Platform and Amazon Web Services supported everything from settlement functions to inventory and member information.
To capture full-stack visibility into all web services, CAINZ needed a unified framework to not only manage service uptime and measure website load speed, but also analyze results and gain actionable insights. With Splunk Observability Cloud, which includes Synthetic Monitoring and Real User Monitoring, CAINZ now easily manages an increasingly complex multicloud environment that supports continued growth.
- 800% improvement in performance of e-commerce sites
- Faster web load speeds and more reliable user experience through proactive troubleshooting
- 20 web services easily monitored at one-minute intervals
Real-time monitoring increases resilience
Troubleshooting microservices across multiple clouds can be daunting for any organization without visibility into its entire infrastructure. Splunk Observability Cloud transforms data into real-time actionable insights and instantly alerts maintenance staff of system anomalies that may trigger critical problems.
“E-commerce is not the only frontend service we’ll have to manage in the days to come,” says Takehiko Kan, head of the digital solution and product development department in CAINZ’s digital strategy division. “So we deployed Splunk Observability Cloud to create a reliable platform to monitor new services.” With Splunk, CAINZ has streamlined frontend management of its e-commerce services down to a limited number of engineers while managing its core systems as usual. “Our Splunk dashboard allows us to visualize processing speed for easy review while also helping us oversee multiple websites simultaneously.”
Web performance improves eightfold
In addition to maintaining service availability, the Splunk solution also simplifies website troubleshooting. As a result, the score CAINZ allocated to its websites’ performance (based on Google’s Core Web Vitals metrics) has increased from the 10s to the 80s — an eightfold improvement. “Splunk allows us to swiftly visualize and rectify performance problems across our e-commerce sites,” says Kan. “This also creates a shared sense of urgency among our teams.” The Splunk platform quickly detects anomalies, analyzes root causes and resolves operational issues with minimal manual effort, tackling hidden challenges that could undermine customer experience.
With Splunk, CAINZ was able to conduct a proof of concept in advance and pick the specific functions needed. Just a month after the initial meeting, CAINZ started using Splunk Synthetic Monitoring to measure website load speed and offer valuable feedback to the development team for timely improvement. “We need a monitoring framework that quickly shows us web service status while continuously measuring website speed,” says Kan. “Avoiding critical system failures is a necessity: E-commerce has a direct impact on our revenue.”
Monitoring 20 services at one-minute intervals
Fifty CAINZ accounts now use Splunk Synthetic Monitoring and Observability Cloud to manage their own infrastructure and services while facilitating SEO. The platform also easily monitors approximately 20 web services at one-minute intervals using Synthetic Monitoring’s uptime check capabilities, while the real browser check evaluates the impact of different factors on website load speed.
In addition, CAINZ has applied Splunk Real User Monitoring to web browser performance visualization and has successfully built a standard framework for complete web service management. With Splunk, CAINZ has boosted website usability through Plan-Do-Check-Act cycles — uncovering performance deterioration in a web service at the proof of concept stage and proactively clearing obstacles. Thanks to Splunk Observability Cloud, CAINZ can now manage multiple websites, using the platform to visualize overall performance degradation by comparing it to other sites.
Splunk shoulders the burden so CAINZ can focus on customers
Moving ahead, CAINZ will continue to unleash the potential of the Splunk product portfolio, maximizing products like Splunk Application Performance Monitoring. Besides bringing in API check, it will also disaggregate frontend systems from core systems to better spot bottlenecks, enhance server-to-server communications and improve visibility into security operations.
Kan also wants to implement the Splunk platform across the company so more teams can manage their websites on their own. Kan says, “By optimizing our development and work processes, Splunk is playing a key role in enhancing our website quality, raising customer satisfaction and reducing complexity throughout our cloud transformation.”
Related Content
E-book
The State of Observability 2022
As observability becomes essential, leaders extend multicloud visibility and dramatically improve digital experiences.
E-book
Forging the Future
How industry leaders use data to be more secure, resilient and innovative.
E-book
Supercharge Your Observability
Learn what an observability platform like Splunk Observability Cloud can do for your business
