Configuring Splunk Data Monitoring for a Big Scandinavian Outdoor Brand

In the digital age, data is both a challenge and an opportunity, especially for an e-commerce retailer operating at scale. Our client, a leader in the apparel industry, faced the critical problem of managing the massive amount of data generated by their microservices architecture. After evaluating the best options, they chose to implement Splunk, with Peakforce by their side to guide the journey.

The Challenge

What are the challenges facing e-commerce businesses? Not losing customers due to technical errors or poor site performance. Understanding customers' choices and making the buying process easier for them. That's why data monitoring and analysis tools like Splunk are essential in this industry.

Our client's expansive setup included Kubernetes clusters, AWS services, and custom applications, each contributing to the data buildup. The primary challenges included:

• A high volume of data from separate sources.
• Limited visibility into service interactions and dependencies.
• Problems with spotting issues in the complex parts of their system.
• Inefficiencies in incident management.

Our Approach

Understanding the critical nature of these challenges, we started our cooperation with deep analysis to ensure that our strategy aligned well with the customer's needs. Our team, consisting of three Splunk experts (including a Splunk Core Consultant), implemented Splunk as their monitoring and observability platform. They integrated the platform with existing data sources and used Splunk Enterprise to ingest, store and query data at scale. Splunk Observability Cloud was implemented to monitor, troubleshoot and optimize their system performance as well as implement APM and RUM.

Monitoring - The process of collecting and displaying data about the behavior and health of the system, such as CPU usage, memory usage, response time, error rate, and availability.

Observability - the ability to understand the internal state and dynamics of the system based on the external outputs, such as logs, metrics and traces.

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The Results

What’s the outcome after our collaboration?

• Continuous Health Check - The client has got the platform to monitor all the system metrics. This includes infrastructure, applications, and services.
• Greater Observability - Nothing can hide inside their system now because Splunk unites all logs, metrics, and traces to present clear business data.
• Solving Problems Faster - In e-commerce, any downtime and poor performance can result in the loss of a customer. Our client can use advanced analytics and machine learning to find and solve incidents quickly.
• Working Smarter - The IT team can now monitor infrastructure performance on a single platform. This means less burden on the team and faster incident detection. 

Benefits of Splunk for E-Commerce

• See Everything Clearly - Start making decisions based on facts and see the whole picture. Integrate the sales and revenue data and invest in the right assets. 
• Faster Threats Response -  Gain your customer’s trust by securing every part of your infrastructure. Splunk lets you proactively identify external threats and protect client’s data. 
• Save Money - Every hour of downtime is a big loss for the e-commerce business. According to Splunk, $87 million is the average cost of downtime per year from lost revenue and productivity. With Splunk, you can now monitor events in real-time, conduct rapid investigations, and resolve issues before they impact customers.  

The Power of Splunk 

It's easy to get lost in the growing number of data sources. But data is the key to making the right decisions, managing incidents and staying ahead of the competition. Founded in 2003, Splunk takes its name from the verb "spelunking" - to explore caves. Like a torch in a dark cave, it brings light and simplicity to complex data.

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, fix the issue, and stay resilient. 

But Splunk is not just about fixing problems. For a large online store, it's important to know what customers like, keep track of all their orders, and make sure they have a great shopping experience. Making the online store available, updating your inventory and predicting the top-selling products. Splunk sifts through all the data to find the critical information that helps you understand your customers and turns it into relevant real-time charts on the dashboard. Find patterns and trends. Fix bottlenecks. And improve your business performance.

What’s the best part? Splunk can grow with the business. As the store gets bigger, Splunk handles more data and more advanced analytics without any trouble. 

So, Splunk isn't just another tool. It's a 360-degree platform for online stores, turning all that data into smart decisions, making processes run better, and keeping the digital doors locked tight against incidents. It's the behind-the-scenes hero that helps keep the system secure and customers happy.

Conclusion

Through our collaboration, the client gained greater insight into the behavior and health of the system across multiple dimensions, including infrastructure, application, service, and business. We also improved security, resulting in faster root cause analysis and anomaly detection. In the course of our cooperation, we plan to introduce further improvements and monitor the system's operation. It's an adventure where every piece of information helps us make the store better and ready for any challenges. 

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