Why Customers Choose Splunk - with Success Stories

What is Splunk?

Data is the new oil. Like oil, data is valuable, but if unrefined it cannot really be used. It has to be changed into gas, plastic, chemicals, etc. to create a valuable entity that drives profitable activity; so, must data be broken down, analyzed for it to have value.
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- Clive Humb, Michael Palmer

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We are overloaded with data, and it doesn't seem to decrease.

The good news? Data is also the key to understanding your customers, making the right decisions and staying ahead of the competition. 

With that in mind, let’s introduce Splunk. It’s a unified platform for analyzing data. It's main purpose is to simplify troubleshooting and provide real-time insights. Founded in 2003, Splunk takes its name from the verb "spelunking" - to explore caves. Like a torch in a dark cave, Splunk brings light and simplicity to complex data.

How does Splunk work?

Officially, Splunk is the name of a US company that develops software for searching, monitoring, and analyzing large amounts of data. Less formally, people refer to Splunk products, services, and other offerings.

Splunk offers a range of products designed to address a variety of data challenges. They all share two key ideas - to turn data into doing (regardless of the source) and to help build the enterprise's digital resilience.

Splunk products by portfolio

Here are the list of Splunk products divided by purpose:

Platform

Splunk’s core SaaS and on-premise offerings. They enable customers to search, analyze, visualize and act on their data.

• Splunk Cloud Platform (SaaS)
• Splunk Enterprise (Private cloud or on-premise)

Observability

More than monitoring. Observability is the ability to understand the state of the system based on the external outputs, such as logs, metrics and traces. With Splunk, we can take a holistic view of disparate systems and easily collect, correlate, and visualize data.

• Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring
• Splunk Application Performance Monitoring (APM)
• Splunk Real User Monitoring (RUM)
• Splunk Log Observer
• Splunk On-Call
• Splunk IT Service Intelligence (ITSI)
• Splunk Observability Cloud
• Splunk Synthetic Monitoring

Security

Monitor, detect, and respond to insider threats and external attacks. With Splunk's centralized platform, the security team can stay vigilant and keep a close eye on the infrastructure in real-time.

• Splunk Enterprise Security
• Splunk User Behavior Analytics
• Splunk SOAR
• Splunk Intelligence Management
• Splunk Mission Control

Splunk Enterprise Security - Product Snapshot 

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Why customers choose Splunk?

The answers may vary. Most of the time they want to protect their digital assets and stay ahead in the tech game. Here are some of the reasons companies need a big data platform:

• Downtime means lost revenue, lost customer trust, and lost business reputation. Companies want to increase digital resilience and rapid response to threats.
• Cyber risk is business risk. Attacks such as ransomware, DDoS or privilege escalation often result in large payments, customer dissatisfaction and data leakage. Companies want to detect and resolve problems before they impact customers.
• Predictive analytics helps organizations make better decisions. With data, they know how to allocate their resources and prioritize issues based on business impact.
• Customers are changing, and so should we. Businesses sometimes fail to keep up with upcoming trends. Splunk helps to understand customers' behavior and preferences.
• Companies want to implement regulatory compliance practices and effectively manage risks - avoiding legal penalties, financial losses, and reputational damage.

How Splunk can help your business

1. Fix the problem before the helpdesk ticket

Splunk provides real-time visibility across all systems, including multi-cloud environments. All data can be analyzed in one place and configured for signature and behavior-based detection. When an anomaly is detected, the security team can respond immediately and nip the problem in the bud.

Why is it better to react quickly? According to a report conducted by Splunk, each hour of downtime costs about $365,000 and an average of $87 million per year in downtime costs from lost revenue and productivity.

Puma success story

Reduce problem resolution time from hours .... to minutes? If you don't know what technical issues stop your customers from buying, you can't fix them quickly. Recognizing this problem, Puma turned to Splunk for a solution. Splunk gave the company a comprehensive view of transactions, including failed sessions and orders. Now Puma's teams can see whether each case is an isolated incident or a problem affecting multiple customers. The result? Saving $108,000 in sales on a single incident!

2. Reduce data silos and track it all

What's going on in your system? wWe can't be sure until the team has full visibility. But there's a solution - Splunk can leverage data from "any source, at any scale, across any environment. Intuitive dashboards help users monitor and learn about important metrics and trends. Splunk offers built-in AI capabilities for advanced analytics and predictive modeling. The benefits? Faster performance on large data sets, predicting future numeric values and identifying hidden patterns for better business outcomes.

Papa Johns's success story

Splunk helps the pizza restaurant chain monitor more than 3,000 locations in North America. With one million orders per week, it's a real challenge. Papa Jones uses Splunk to monitor each location and respond to incidents before they affect customers. The company focuses on resiliency so that a system failure does not result in a loss of customers. Splunk also gives Papa Johns tools to identify ways to improve deliverability, dispatching and routing so that pizzas arrive fresh in the shortest possible time.

3. Cybersecurity made easier

Cyber threats are the bane of today's world. A successful attack can result in financial loss, reputational damage and the leak of sensitive data. This year, 87% of organizations say they have been the target of a ransomware attack (up from 79% last year), according to a Splunk report. Seeing the big picture of data is one thing, but it's also important to automate and unburden the professionals involved. Splunk can automate tasks, workflows and set up repetitive processes across all of your security tools. It also provides alerts for serious risks such as compromised credentials, insider threats or ransomware.

McGraw Hill success story

We wouldn't wish the incident at McGraw Hill on anyone. After internal email addresses were leaked, employees received a lot of phishing emails. All they had was a basic email monitoring system. It was a defining moment - they decided to bring automation to their security systems. Splunk proved to be a winner. The intuitive system allows all logs to be analyzed and monitored in one place.

The results speak for themselves. In the first six months of 2020, McGraw Hill resolved an impressive 9,439 security events through automated response.

Peakforce case study

How did we turn our client's challenge into a success story?

Our business partner faced several problems in managing and troubleshooting their system.

While huge amounts of data are both a curse and a great opportunity, analyzing it is the key to staying ahead. Because our client operates on a large-scale microservices architecture, they implemented Splunk as their monitoring and observability platform.

Our first step was an in-depth analysis of the customer's issues and needs:

• High volume and variety of data sources, such as Kubernetes clusters, AWS services, and custom applications
• Lack of visibility into the dependencies and interactions between different components and services
• Difficulty in identifying the root cause of issues and anomalies across multiple layers and domains
• Slow and inefficient incident response and resolution processes

The main task was to create a system to observe the three basic pillars of observability. Metrics, logs, and traces were collected from different layers of the environment. The project team consisted of three Splunk Experts (including one Splunk Core Consultant) along with the guidance of an engineer from the client's side.

After the initiation phase, we’ve started the project - always open to feedback along the way.

What has changed for our partner after the project?

• Improved visibility into the system's behavior and health across multiple dimensions, such as infrastructure, application, service and business.
• Enhanced observability into the system's internal state and dynamics based on logs, metrics and traces.
• Faster root cause analysis and anomaly detection using advanced analytics and machine learning capabilities.
• Increased efficiency and productivity of their IT operations team using a unified platform for monitoring and observability.
• Reduced mean time to detect (MTTD) and mean time to resolve (MTTR) incidents using proactive alerting and automation features.

What will be your success story?

Our customers know best that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Splunk is a breakthrough tool for analyzing data from multiple sources and detecting cyber threats. With a customized configuration, organizations can find problems quickly, know when things are changing for the worse, and fix problems faster.

If you are just getting started with Splunk or are looking for experts in the field, contact us for a free consultation.

Sources:

Digital Resilience Pays Off - Splunk Report 2023

PUMA Improves Its E-Commerce Experience to Boost Revenue by $10,000 Per Hour

Splunk Accelerate cloud-driven transformation

Better Data. Better Pizza. Papa Johns satisfies customers’ cravings for an exceptional digital experience.

State of Security 2024: The Race to Harness AI

Top 5 Use Cases for Splunk Enterprise Security

McGraw Hill Amplifies Security Efficiency With Splunk SOAR

What Is Splunk & What Does It Do? A Splunk Intro

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If you find an error or have a suggestion for our blog, please email us at contact@peakforce.dev.

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