With Splunk ITSI, much of this becomes turnkey. Some of the built-in modules within Splunk ITSI allow us to realize an immediate benefit.
From Switchboards to Dashboards: Communications Leader Finds New Solutions
Since 1930, CenturyLink has grown from a rural telephone carrier to a consumer, business and enterprise broadband, security, IT services and cloud provider across the U.S. and around the world.
Along the way, it has faced challenges. Since deploying Splunk Enterprise seven years ago and Splunk IT Service Intelligence (ITSI) recently, the company has seen benefits including:
- Successes in mission-critical monitoring, providing executive-level visibility and improved resolution time
- Fast time to value and return on investment (ROI)
- Steep decreases in mean-time-to-identify (MTTI) and mean-time-to-resolution (MTTR)
Challenges
- Assembling information from a variety of silos and legacy apps
- Need for executive-level visibility into IT and business operations
- Call centers and other divisions turning to IT for help instead of assessing their own problems independently
Business Impact
- Much faster time to identify and resolve issues
- Epic return on investment
- Family of solutions and add-ons for monitoring and analysis
Why Splunk
Due to acquisitions, CenturyLink had a need for quick insight into in-house and third-party applications. Previously, something as simple as a new code release for the billing system could cause IT to spend a week running Perl scripts to retrieve log data. “The guy who was trying to do that,” recalls Jeff Burchfield, senior lead software developer, “used to sit right next to me, and you could tell he was frustrated when he had to do it.” After installing Splunk Enterprise, he says, “I had one of the reports done in under an hour. Then we went to proof of concept. Our goal was to produce 15 reports in three days, and I had everything done on day one.”
Today, the Splunk platform is used for business and Operational Intelligence, DevOps, project management analysis drawing on CA Agile Central, pulling information from the company data warehouse—anywhere, Burchfield explains, “for rapid triaging the IT environment to provide critical executive-level visibility. If you name it, we’re probably doing it.”
