For an e-commerce company the failure of communication between enterprise systems can cause a loss of order in worst case, and significant amount of delay in order processing in best cases. Integration Operation teams are here to ensure smooth performance of middleware solutions.
Integration Operations teams are responsible for monitoring and maintaining all the integration platforms and supporting applications scattered across the complex IT landscape. These integration platforms often hidden in the background, play the crucial role of message brokers and business process management engines. Often acting as central point for all information exchange between stand-alone systems in an organisation. For example, in an e-commerce company the crucial process of placing an order can already involve multiple systems such as, customer portals, customer relationship management system, campaign management system, inventory management system, payment processing system and so on.
The communication between these systems runs via one or more integration platforms and is monitored, managed and maintained by Integration Operations teams. It is obvious that failure of communication between any of these two systems can cause a loss of order in worst case, and significant amount of delay in order processing in best cases. Inability to timely and swiftly handling of these technical failures can have direct impact on customer satisfaction and overall business in general. Integration Operation teams therefore spend a big chunk of their time to ensure smooth performance of these middleware solutions. Active system monitoring is carried out with an intention to detect and fix errors in the business processes.
The problem and the solution
Relying on manual active monitoring of various systems is complex and involves logging into multiple systems and looking across various screens to search for an error. This approach is time consuming, manual and non-preventive in nature. To tackle this problem, Splunk can provide a single solution to monitor all needs across the organisation. It can pull log information from any application in any data format or can push relevant information to the applications. It helps Integration Operation teams to monitor, alert, detect, visualise and report errors timely and pre-emptively.
By using Splunk integration, operation teams can streamline and automate their active monitoring tasks. The ability to visualise data in form of dashboards and reports helps teams to identify failure points quickly to provide swift solutions. Predictions help gain insights in future with out of the box support for machine learning.
Use Case
Setup of Splunk in the organisation starts with getting a Splunk tenant and pushing data into it. It can be connected to all the available applications in your landscape. The technical logs such as server logs and network logs should also be sent to Splunk. An important point to keep in mind is you do not have to tell Splunk about the schema of the incoming data. That’s why it is very flexible and adaptive if your data format changes over time. Once Splunk has all the logs from various applications, it can help you find associations, correlations and identify errors or anomalies. By using Splunk’s own search and query language SPL, users can query the data from various applications from one screen. Dashboards can be created on top of the data to show real time health of applications at technical level along with the functional data flowing through them. The ability to drill down in data is helpful when investigating incidents. Along with this, the automated alerting and reporting ensures that the no errors are left un-noticed.
Benefits
Introduction of Splunk in the organisation leads to:
- Deeper insights in your organisation’s data by advanced visualisation and statistics.
- Fast error detection and hence speedy error resolution.
- Less dependency on manual system/application check by configuring automatic alerting and reporting.
- One portal for all your monitoring needs.
Would you like to know more about Splunk or how we can take your enterprise a step further by implementing Splunk? Contact us now!