With Splunk Enterprise, we’re making wait times as short as possible. I don’t believe there is any other product on the market that is able to quickly bring together diverse data sets, offer a powerful language to engineers for data analysis and then ultimately deliver beautiful, visual, actionable reports to the business users.
Yelp Standardizes on Splunk Enterprise; Democratizes its Data to Ensure Great Customer Experience
Yelp connects millions of people with local businesses through its website and mobile app.
To ensure a great customer experience the company has standardized on the Splunk Enterprise data analytics platform, enabling hundreds of technical and non-technical users—from site reliability engineers to product managers—to gain actionable business insights. Since deploying Splunk Enterprise, Yelp has seen benefits including:
- Improving website uptime with real-time notifications
- Quickly and reliably delivering application features to users
- Uncovering business insights and improving the customer experience
- Saving engineering hours by liberating the data for all users
Challenges
- Difficulty accessing and managing data across the enterprise
- Open source platform lacked stability and scalability needed to accommodate large and growing data volume
- Accessing data to make actionable decisions took up to weeks
- Developers lacked infrastructure visibility needed to ensure smooth application delivery
Business Impact
- Deployed in days and gained fast time to value
- Improving website uptime with real-time notifications
- Enhancing customer experience with real-time business insights
- Reducing business analytics from up to weeks to real time
- Quickly and reliably delivering application features to users
- Democratizing data access for technical and non-technical users
Why Splunk
Kris Wehner, vice president of engineering, Yelp Reservations, runs the company’s services related to restaurant reservations, including restaurant and diner-facing technology. According to Wehner, a primary challenge at Yelp prior to adopting Splunk Enterprise was that log data was nearly inaccessible to non-engineering staff, and even the engineers found it difficult to access. There was never enough engineering bandwidth to provide numbers and data to everyone who needed it to make business decisions, and getting accurate answers sometimes took weeks.
The company had experimented with different tools to manage its data including Elasticsearch as part of its open source strategy. “That effort stalled due to scale issues,” Wehner says. “We were having lots of problems pushing 10-plus terabytes of data per day into Elasticsearch clusters and having it remain stable. We’d have partial data availability, which made it really hard to rely upon as a single source of truth.”
When Wehner joined Yelp through an acquisition a few years ago he and his team introduced Splunk Enterprise to the engineering, product and business organizations. Next, the company moved forward with a proof of concept (POC) to show how the software could help Yelp succeed at a larger scale. “The Splunk POC demonstrated its capability to notify engineers if there was anything going on with the website in real time, which wasn’t possible before,” Wehner says. From there, the team deployed Splunk Enterprise in a matter of days and gained fast time to value.
