More Than 300 People Gain Better Access to Data
Zillow Group empowers consumers with data-driven insights into real estate questions. Historically, the “build not buy” operation relied on open-source or homegrown utilities for service, IT monitoring and quality control. But these solutions could not keep up with the log data volume generated by disparate web properties and applications. Monitoring was crude and alerting was nonexistent.
According to Seth Thomas, director of site operations, Zillow, “There was not a standard format for log files and no incentive to keep things standard. It was extremely challenging to access this information because the data was tightly controlled. If production had a question about a site or service, it took time to find the person who could access the logs, and additional time to query the data. The systems were so disjointed and unreliable that we didn’t know whether we would get the queries working properly.”
Zillow knew it had to standardize its log and other data infrastructure management with a solution that could scale with its growing business and provide full operational visibility. Thomas says, “We wanted to expose the data we were generating without having to go through multiple bottlenecks. Splunk® software gives us the ability to create ad hoc reporting and access all logs and data at any time. Being part of the larger Splunk ecosystem is extremely valuable to us. We couldn’t replicate that if we tried to build something on our own.”
Zillow deployed Splunk software for IT monitoring and application management in 2013. Since then, the company has continued to expand its deployment, upgrading to an enterprise adoption agreement (EAA) in 2014 and increasing its data volume. Zillow has woven the Splunk platform into the foundation of its infrastructure and is also in the process of deploying Splunk Cloud. Currently, more than 300 individuals from IT operations, engineering, customer care and the mobile team use the Splunk platform.