What is our primary use case?
We have our application development and we monitor our websites. I create alerts and dashboards to help us notify if we have any infrastructure issues.
We get our data in and then I create some SQL queries to find out where our averages are and do some predictive analysis. When we deviate from the normal, that is where I like to set up alerts and dashboards. I have alerts that trigger and link to dashboards to see the trend over time or what happened last hour. There is also alerting to the phones.
How has it helped my organization?
I believe Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring has improved our organization because, over time, it has always been pinpointing the source of the problem. We have pretty quick responses knowing that we have a problem, and we can drill in pretty quickly to find out where the problem might be occurring. Is it a specific server or is it happening to multiple systems across the board? It is easy to visualize that.
Monitoring multiple cloud environments is pretty easy because it just aggregates from different places, and when we have an outage, we can say, "Oh! Amazon West is having a problem."
Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring provides end-to-end visibility into our cloud-native environment. I am not directly involved with the cloud portion of it, but for our developers, end-to-end observability is important because we have multiple platforms and systems.
Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring has reduced our mean time to resolve. I cannot put a number on that, but compared to years ago, we now do a pretty good job of infrastructure monitoring. We can better monitor a bunch of different aspects of our business.
Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring has improved our organization's business resilience. We do not want to be down, and we do not want people to be not able to pay their bills online.
What is most valuable?
It is a great resource for us because we have so many different data sources and to be able to aggregate that and put it through a concise dashboard or an alert really helps.
What needs improvement?
We have both on-prem and cloud, and the challenge is getting all our log data aggregated or streams aggregated so that it is real-time. We do a pretty good job of that, but our organization is not using it as a security platform when it can do a great job of that. We have other tools that we use, but we should leverage this more in our organization because we have already got the tools and the software.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring since 2019.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
It is very stable. Especially since we went to the cloud, it just makes it easier for us.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
We have not had any issues there.
How are customer service and support?
Their technical support has been very good. I have not had to use it a whole lot because we have pretty good and experienced staff. We use consultants, and in general, we have been lucky. We work with our representative, and we have hired a couple of contractors.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We have used different solutions in the past. I used CA Wily. New Relic was another tool we had used for a time.
We had several different tools that we were using for APM monitoring and website monitoring. Over time, we migrated more to the Splunk platform because it helps to aggregate the data. Having to configure all the agents was painful, and Splunk made that a lot easier.
How was the initial setup?
It was pretty easy. We had to set up all of our collectors. Getting our feeds was critical.
We have an on-prem setup, so we have a lot of forwarders. We are also on the cloud. We have a data center locally, and we have one in Texas. We also have a third one that I like to call the cloud, so we have three different environments that we move between, and it is nice that when we have a problem, we can tell exactly where it is.
What about the implementation team?
John Ansett's company helped us with our initial deployment. They did an excellent job.
What was our ROI?
We have seen an ROI. It is hard to put a price on downtime, but our primary business is travel, insurance, as well as automotive. We are a diverse organization, but our bread and butter is insurance. If there is downtime, people cannot pay their insurance bills online, or they cannot look up the policy and that type of information. Being down is not good for our customers.
We have seen a time to value. I use a lot of dashboards for monitoring, and I have trained other teams in our organization on how to use the tool. It is starting to have a lot of legs now, and we got a lot of different diverse departments using the tool. We are getting a lot of experienced staff to use the tool and make their own desktops.
It is difficult to put a price on how fast you can find a problem and resolve the problem. We have got web services and servers, and sometimes, pinpointing where the problem is took the longest time. Having ITSI observability and Splunk dashboarding together has helped a lot with that.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
I am not in that circle, but we are currently licensing based on our queries. That is working out for us. Previously, it was by volume of data, and now, we can store as much data as we want.
What other advice do I have?
I would rate Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring a ten out of ten because that is primarily what I use every day. I love the product.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.