Data drives insight into student experience
To help students get the most out of their educational experience, Haggerty and his team first needed a 360-degree view into NJIT’s mission-critical services — and Splunk was there to help NJIT understand its campus activity in more depth. Splunk Observability Cloud and Splunk Synthetic Monitoring revealed campus density patterns, giving the team a window into the number of students using facilities like the library or dining hall at any given time. That insight helped the university to better distribute campus resources to match students’ organic movements on campus and avoid overcrowding.
And future use cases will continue to marry academic data to campus infrastructure data to provide a clearer picture of the relationship of the use of campus spaces and student success to drive a whole-student experience across all of NJIT. For example, by getting the big picture of vehicle traffic flows and available parking spaces across campus, they could guide commuting students to lots and parking spaces closer to their classrooms — in turn, reducing the chances they’d park illegally and be ticketed, which might compound existing financial stresses.
Splunk Core, Synthetic Monitoring, ITSI, and Splunk Observability also give the NJIT team a large window into which applications and systems are working — and which ones aren’t. In 2023, Haggerty and his team conducted a comprehensive user experience study on student services and applications then combined the results with Splunk usage patterns and analytics to identify improvements to the student services IT platform. With Splunk, Haggerty and his team could drill down into where students were experiencing issues such as long load times, as well as which services were difficult to access, outdated, or not adequately meeting student needs. The resulting data helped them to go to administrators with an accurate picture of applications that needed to be updated or replaced altogether. The same alerting that trims MTTD and MTTR by double digits also flags anomalies in student-facing services long before users are aware of them.
”We’re using everything we have at our fingertips to better understand our users and then ask them, ‘Is this what you need?’” Haggerty says. “It allows us to really dig in and think differently.”
Opening doors to a real-world future
Few things can open doors for students like hands-on experience. By partnering with NJIT’s Ying Wu College of Computing, Haggerty gave students a chance to learn practical skills by working on real-world projects that would set them up for future success.
Working with Splunk and TekStream, the team is building a student-powered SOC to augment security team shortages to help students gain valuable cybersecurity skills, and possibly a new career path. Haggerty and his team hired several students to run the SOC and is designing a program that will cover critical security functions while also accommodating students’ unique interests and goals, for example systems security or forensic investigations. Working at the SOC will also teach students valuable skills such as incident response processes, observability best practices, and using monitoring systems. By automating routine testing, the operations team can redirect the 120 staff hours they’ve reclaimed into mentoring the student SOC, a win-win that builds skills while keeping the campus safer.
Going forward, Haggerty and his team will continue to rely on Splunk to evolve and grow in parallel with the needs of the students and the university. In the near future, that means feeding Splunk data into machine-learning models to forecast demand spikes, expanding automated remediation playbooks, and wiring security analytics directly into the student-led SOC. By partnering with students in that effort, NJIT and Splunk are further preparing them for a lifetime of learning.
“I very much view the students as a core part of that plan and being able to help us. And they’re excited,” Haggerty says. “Having them right here in our own shop — you can’t get any better than that.”
I could talk about technology all day long. But if I’m not doing things that impact student
success and help improve our research and advance innovation, to me it doesn’t really matter. What really matters is our commitment to creating a culture that works for everyone and understanding how we can really help students succeed.
