VESCA Automates Data Analysis and Incident Management for Proactive Problem-Solving, 24/7 Service

Flexible log analysis is essential to improve business performance.

Japan’s credit card payment and marketing services provider VESCA experienced this firsthand when its business surged due to the boom in e-commerce and cashless payments. With its monthly credit card payment transactions exceeding 10 million and tens of thousands of multipayment terminals in operation, VESCA was under pressure to better protect member data while monitoring unauthorized access, as required by the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS).

“While meeting basic PCI DSS requirements, our old log management system was not flexible enough to collect logs in a tool-dependent way — let alone correlate and analyze data for actionable insights,” says Shin Matsuzawa, VESCA’s general manager of operations. To simplify compliance and ensure its services are always available to customers, VESCA turned to Splunk®.

Easier Access to Data

With the Splunk platform’s ability to centrally manage disparate data streams through real-time, correlative analytics, VESCA now seamlessly operates Ark — its multipayment platform — and Seeds — its payment and marketing platform. Splunk’s robust visualization capabilities convert complex unstructured data into intuitive formats for automated reporting and PCI DSS compliance, allowing VESCA users to search data anytime, anywhere and without predefined schemas.

Splunk has also created a stress-free experience for monitoring cloud architecture. “We used to outsource on-premises system management and monitor our cloud platform in-house with multiple tools, but the enormous growth of data became a big challenge with limited operation resources. After evaluating other solutions like Elasticsearch, Splunk is second to none,” Matsuzawa says.

From 24 Hours of Investigation to Minutes of Monitoring

Gone are the days when two or three staff spent a whole day just to tackle a single system failure. With Splunk, VESCA predefines a workflow to automatically detect problems in just minutes versus an entire day. The Splunk platform’s advanced Search Processing Language (SPL) allows VESCA to easily sift through massive amount of log data in real time to quickly resolve errors. With more reliable operations and faster incident resolution, VESCA provides better customer support across its millions of transactions.

Part of the Splunk platform, Splunk On-Call — formerly known as VictorOps — helps the VESCA team route and resolve incidents with ease. Splunk On-Call aggregates a vast number of alerts from multiple systems, only escalating the problem to the team who should act on it. These filtering and prioritization capabilities not only accelerate troubleshooting and simplify the management of Seeds, they also slash operations costs by narrowing the scope of monitoring tasks that need to be outsourced.

“With Splunk On-Call as part of the broader Splunk platform, we’ve reduced incident management resources by 86% and incident response effort by 99%,” says Matsuzawa. “We have also raised the bar in customer service by making the positive shift from reactive to proactive problem-solving.” Special appreciation goes to the “human touch” of the Splunk Community. “Splunk is more than just a tool,” says Matsuzawa. “There is a powerful community behind it, which helps us connect and exchange useful information with other Japanese users.”

Seizing the Opportunities of the New Normal

The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the shift to contactless transactions and cashless payment, and VESCA is keeping pace with the new normal. To better meet customer demands, VESCA plans to optimize service by integrating its Ark and Seeds systems. To achieve these initiatives, VESCA will rely on the Splunk platform for business analytics, simpler workflows and real-time visualization of operational performance.

“The Splunk platform frees us up when it comes to first-response tasks, and we are exploring other Splunk solutions, such as SignalFx for cloud monitoring and Splunk Phantom for security orchestration, automation and response,” Matsuzawa says.