Splunk is the foundation of our AI initiatives. It’s the cornerstone of our technical data gathering, retention, and searching capabilities.
Dun & Bradstreet Gains Global Visibility with Splunk Observability Cloud
Key Challenges
Disconnected tools and siloed teams created a fragmented view of application health, slowing incident response, and threatening the continuous availability required for global operations.
Key Results
With Splunk, Dun & Bradstreet gained global application visibility, significantly reduced MTTD and MTTR, and built custom AI agents that cut incident analysis down to just two minutes.
For 185 years, Dun & Bradstreet has been in the business of business data.
Companies of all sizes rely on Dun & Bradstreet to manage risk, control costs, and accelerate growth. Delivering reliable credit, marketing, and analytics solutions from a database of more than 500 million business records demands continuous application availability. Even just seconds of downtime can disrupt global commerce.
Although the company had sensors deployed and a virtual command center to monitor outages, it lacked a global, unified view, which slowed incident response and threatened the company’s revenue and reputation. “When I first joined Dun & Bradstreet, we struggled with many disparate tools across various teams, each operating in its own silo,” admits Dima Gromov, senior principal engineer for Dun & Bradstreet’s technical operations organization.
Equipped with Application Performance Monitoring (APM), synthetic monitoring, and OpenTelemetry, Splunk Observability Cloud provided the enterprise-grade foundation Dun & Bradstreet needed to scale for its next century of business.
Outcomes
- Unified visibility across all applications
- Significantly reduced Mean Time to Detect (MTTD) and Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR)
- 2,000+ synthetic tests migrated with Splunk Professional Services
From silos to a single pane of glass with Splunk Observability Cloud
Migrating from a legacy observability provider to Splunk Observability Cloud required Dun & Bradstreet to untangle decades of ingrained processes.
That’s where Splunk Professional Services stepped in. The team migrated more than 2,000 synthetic tests and instrumented infrastructure and Application Performance Monitoring (APM) for the company’s critical Tier 1 applications. “Splunk Professional Services knew how to implement, architect, and migrate everything,” says Gromov. “They were essential to our success.”
Now, Dun & Bradstreet has an observability pipeline that flows through Splunk IT Service Intelligence (ITSI), aggregating alerts from every tool into a centralized dashboard. This single pane of glass allows stakeholders to immediately engage with an incident, distinguishing between local issues and broader regional outages. The result is global awareness of application health across services and teams and significantly reduced MTTD and MTTR.
Previously, application problems might only send email alerts to individual teams. Without centralized awareness, a full enterprise response to an issue could be delayed. Now, synthetic monitoring and improved alerting help Dun & Bradstreet identify and resolve service disruptions before they impact end users. This proactive approach allows the observability team to focus on strategy. By using Splunk to improve application availability and user experience, the team actively drives customer satisfaction.
“We’ve brought together disconnected tools from across the business into a single data platform, giving everyone the exact insights they need,” says Gromov.
The AI and Splunk synergy
Today, Dun & Bradstreet uses AI chatbots and agents to speed up data analysis and resolve internal inquiries. “Splunk is the foundation of our AI initiatives,” says Peter Thomas, senior director of observability. “It’s the cornerstone of our technical data gathering, retention, and searching capabilities.”
The chatbot lets users converse about the root cause of incidents and the AI queries Splunk data to perform the investigation. The AI handles complex searches across the company’s multiple Splunk instances automatically. This eliminates the need for technical queries to be written manually by experts, so teams can find answers quickly. Now, anyone at Dun & Bradstreet can get expert-level insights from Splunk
When an incident occurs, an AI agent proactively reviews Splunk observability data, Splunk Cloud logs, historical occurrences of that alert, recent changes that could be responsible, and application runbooks for recommended response procedures. Within two minutes, it provides a detailed analysis and response recommendations, saving the team hours of manual work and helping them identify and fix issues faster.
“By our metrics, the speed at which our internal chatbot can query and analyze Splunk data makes it in excess of 10 times as efficient as doing it manually,” says Thomas. “And you don’t need a Splunk specialist at the ready to do it.”
A sweet ending to a new beginning
Looking ahead, Dun & Bradstreet is implementing automated incident response and resolutions, executing pre-choreographed responses to the most common issues. The company also plans to further invest in AI agents to manage time-intensive assessments and investigations so staff can focus on strategic initiatives
"Splunk gives us the data, and AI gives us the speed,” says Thomas. “Like chocolate and peanut butter, it’s the perfect combination.”
