Key Challenges
Splunk’s own cloud transformation meant that our IT team had to maintain a complex hybrid environment while mitigating development costs.
Key Results
Splunk products give our IT organization the visibility to achieve optimal service response, minimal outages, improved infrastructure and more reliable application performance.
Splunk is a growing, global business with customers in 130 countries that depend on us to keep their businesses resilient. For our international IT team, that means time is of the essence; a single outage could be disastrous. With stakes this high, our IT, security and DevOps teams use the Splunk platform to work together to secure our environment — even as we grow more complex as a result of rising data volumes and our cloud transformation.
With Splunk Cloud Platform, our IT team keeps its commitment to uptime and reliability, ensuring that Splunkers always have the tools they need to stay connected and productive. And with Splunk Observability Cloud, teams across the organization can see into our complex environment and act quickly based on data. This adds up to significant cost savings and efficiencies that directly impact customer — and Splunker — satisfaction. Now that’s a win-win.
As Splunk grows, so does the array of services that powers our technologies. Splunk’s cloud business intelligence team keeps tabs on what’s being used and what can be eliminated to save costs. With Splunk Cloud Platform, they found a veritable gold mine — to the tune of $600k a year — in unused developer instances no longer used by customers and Splunkers.
Finding and eliminating unnecessary costs isn’t just vital for Splunk’s business resilience. It’s also critical in our mission to provide the best service for our customers — which includes guaranteed 100% uptime for all Splunk Cloud Platform customers — as we reappropriate unused resources to optimize ones that customers are actively using. Using our own platform to analyze spend versus usage, the team identified unattended live developer instances that were no longer needed. By eliminating costs associated with aging and unused applications, the team reduced AWS costs and ensured that any running instances were optimally provisioned — improving customer experience and satisfaction.
When I first joined, it wasn't uncommon to have outages in some of the third party applications we used last for hours. By using Splunk Observability Cloud and our own forwarders and dashboards, we figured out what was causing the problem, helping us reach zero outages for the week, then the month and ultimately for the entire year.
When the world went remote in 2020, it became clear — very quickly — that you can give employees all the tools they need to be productive, but those tools need to be reliable in order for WFH to really work. When a third-party collaboration app started to have frequent outages and threatened to affect Splunk employees’ productivity, the employee collaboration engineering team got to work — with help from Splunk Observability Cloud.
“When I first joined it wasn't uncommon to have outages that lasted hours,” says Greg Warner, Senior Manager, Productivity and Platforms. And those outages weren’t cheap — every time this third-party collaboration app went down, it cost the company an average of $600k per hour. The team began using Splunk Observability Cloud to track critical variables in the logs, such as memory management, and pinpoint root causes — before they caused an outage.
By eliminating these issues, the employee collaboration engineering team now proactively predicts and prevents outages — even during vulnerable times such as release updates. “By using Splunk Observability Cloud and our own forwarders and dashboards, we figured out what was causing the problem, helping us reach zero outages for the week, then the month and ultimately for the entire year.”
Members of the employee collaboration engineering team have a big job on their hands: as a vital part of Splunk’s overarching cloud journey strategy, they must keep close eyes on issues across the company’s vast ecosystem of tools and applications. One of these third-party applications was vital to Splunkers’ ability to collaborate. When the team decided to move to the app’s cloud environment, it was critical that the migration be as seamless as possible to ensure Splunkers could continue working without interruption.
But a migration of this size is a sizable undertaking, brimming with complexity and complicated by the large amounts of data that must be moved. The team relied on Splunk Cloud Platform to conduct load tests to ensure features migrated successfully. The platform even identified an underlying tooling challenge before the vendor did, improving the team’s internal scaling capabilities. Thanks to these efforts, the team successfully migrated 11,000 users to the collaboration app in a single weekend, ensuring a seamless experience for users around the globe.
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