Splunk
Transforming DevOps Processes

Change is inevitable. And in the fast-moving world of IT, organizations should constantly update their existing applications to sustain in the market. With legacy systems in place, there is often confusion between developers and operational teams which often underpins software release date. The concept of DevOps today is the quintessential fix to this long-standing problem. Since, its emergence in Europe in 2011, DevOps has made its way into different parts of the world, with companies using it to remove the gap between development and operation teams.

However, what exactly is DevOps and how important is it for a company?

In a nutshell, DevOps is a collaborative work culture built to aid companies in developing software, websites, and applications. In the traditional waterfall method, the requirements were predefined where developers programmed software and operators handled the implementation for practical use. However, with the accelerating pace of IT, the needs of software development accelerated which led to the emergence of agile methodology. Albeit this model enabled the developers to act promptly and act on the bugs in real-time, the functioning of operational teams still lacked agility. This scenario led software companies to deploy DevOps approach for overseeing the release, deployment, operation, and monitoring during software lifecycle process.

Briefly, DevOps is a theoretical framework that facilitates cohesive and seamless functioning for development and operations team. It also has significant contribution to quality assurance as it links the development, operations, and support organizations directly with customers. Owing to the unprecedented benefits, the market witnessed a radical upsurge of DevOps implementation with a recent report from Forrester stating that 50 percent of organizations have already implemented DevOps practices. DevOps improves communication between developers, QA, and operation teams and enables IT companies to build, test, and release new software efficiently and before specified deadlines. Although for many companies DevOps practices has kicked off, the critical barriers for developing a perfect DevOps culture still remains a distance dream. Building a perfect synchrony between app development and IT operations team becomes a tedious task for organizations and transitioning from the legacy system to technologies such as cloud further fuels challenges. Teams struggle due to lack of visibility in different tools and systems because of the market pressure of releasing software early and other complexities at every stage of the lifecycle management process.

Splunk entered the market to change all this.

With the Splunk platform, IT firms can find, trace, and fix issues in real time. Bugs which may otherwise take days or weeks to locate can be tracked down with Splunk in real time. The platform further enables users to collect, index and correlate data from disparate sources. Splunk can provide insights into data in any environment like testing, staging, and production.

Moreover, developers can search and visualize data from production environment with needing to access any production machine.

The software delivers application lifecycle intelligence which enables its clients to track every code check-in, build, test, and deployment in real time. The software further aids companies in making DevOps practices through continuous integration and implementation and further assists companies to promptly trace and identify errors anytime in the code base. Users can also search and monitor application intelligence delivering from logs and garner real-time insights from the systems and processes to bolster application development lifecycle.

Additionally, the platform maintains stringent privacy and security policy which always remains one of the paramount concerns among organizations. To this end, the firm also trains all its employees to handle data in a secured manner by complying with international and industry standards. The Splunk platform improves DevOps process by providing real-time monitoring, proactive alerting, and visibility of IT services. The real-time visibility of the entire application stack enables companies to get comprehensive visibility into application performance, transactions, and user activity. This leads organizations to have faster releases, reduced MTTR, and optimization of application quality, performance, and costs.

A Peek into the Products

The firm offers Splunk Enterprise that enables users to aggregate, analyze, and get pertinent information from machine data and boost business results. The product gleans the untapped value from machine data and allows companies to remain competitive with reduced downtime and better customer experience. Using this product, organizations can accelerate query speeds with metrics to boost performance and further convert log data into parameters for supplementing the functionality of monitoring and alerting. The product also facilitates companies to access data irrespective of location and streamlines data from the open source and proprietary solutions, including Apache Kafka and AWS Firehouse Kineses.

Furthermore, Splunk Enterprise leverages AI to predict future IT, security, and profitability. The integrated tools and commands in the product enable organizations to collect, clean, visualize, and publish data insights. For companies that don’t have the adequate infrastructure for developing DevOps culture, the firm offers Splunk Cloud.

The product covers all the infrastructure requirements of its clients and starts functioning in merely two days without quelling any radical changes in the infrastructure. It maximizes the existing resources of a company and primarily focuses on building data automation, dashboards, reports, and alerts rather than just backend plumbing. One of the clients’ testimonies reads, “I was blown away with the instant access to intelligent visual reports, the broad scope of use cases, and the embedded security in Splunk Cloud.” The product assisted this client to improve customer experience with real-time analytics.

Previously, the client had depended greatly on spreadsheets and emails which were impacting the current status quo of the company. With Splunk Cloud, the firm was able to build strong customer relationships and improve profitability through a comprehensive focus on the customer’s need.

Splunk Light

Other than this, the firm offers Splunk Light that enables its clients to search, report, and alert log data in real time from one single source. The product allows for organizations to secure IT environment through the collection, indexing, monitoring, reporting, and alerting of your machine data. Whenever a malicious activity occurs, the product acts on it in an automated manner and sends emails to the concerned department. The product also brings forth remediation scripts to initiate the action plan during those events.

Over the years, the firm has assisted several companies to make data accessible, usable, and valuable for everyone. In one instance, Zillow Group, a real estate and home-related brands company was facing problems to glean comprehensive insight into massive volume of log event data across its widely distributed infrastructure. The challenges triggered when third-party and homegrown open-source solutions didn’t keep with the data volume. Additionally, log files weren’t standardized and contained unnecessary information which required robust monitoring and reporting solution for overseeing data. To get full visibility of the service and quality metrics, the firm deployed Splunk Enterprise, and results were visible in real time. The association enabled Zillow Group to improve uptime and maintain SLAs for resolving the issues. They were also able to improve DevOps collaboration for a faster software release and superior customer experience. The other noteworthy benefit was that they were able to create ad-hoc reporting and glean visibility of transactions in real time. With Splunk Enterprise, Zillow was able to overcome the limitations of traditional homegrown tools which made their entire team more effective and enabled them to carry out ad-hoc queries, along with troubleshooting to reduce escalations.

The Future Vision

To expand its global footprint and commercialize its product reach, the firm continually looks for strategic partners globally. Recently, the firm acquired Krypton to expand its ability to innovate IoT use cases with its machine data platform. The firm also partnered with VictorOps to add collaborative incident management capabilities to Splunk’s portfolio and further create an analytics-driven “Platform of Engagement” for DevOps and IT customers that will empower them to prevent and resolve incidents in an improved manner. Modern engineering and operations teams are quickly embracing IT strategies fueled by DevOps to help solve challenges like vague alerts, reactive operations, and siloed teams. “The combination of Splunk and VictorOps is a natural fit that will help organizations around the world innovate faster than ever before,” says Doug Merritt, President, and CEO, Splunk. “We welcome the VictorOps team to Splunk and look forward to working together to help organizations deliver high-quality customer engagements driven by machine data analytics.” In the days ahead, the firm intends to continue to play an exemplary role in solving some of the tedious IT, Internet of Things and security challenges of the market.