Splunk helps IT operations (ITOps) teams simultaneously reduce their mean time to resolution (MTTR) and drive collaboration. To better understand Splunk, let’s take a closer look at the software platform, how it works and its benefits.
What Is Splunk?
Splunk is a software platform that transforms machine data into meaningful insights for business users. It enables ITOps teams to examine real-time data across cloud, hybrid and on-premises environments. Splunk also collects and correlates machine data, and by doing so, enables ITOps teams to quickly troubleshoot outages, monitor service levels and identify anomalies.
Ultimately, Splunk offers many benefits for ITOps teams, and these benefits include:
- Advanced ITOps Analytics: Splunk transforms machine data into actionable insights, enabling ITOps teams to identify and resolve problems faster than ever before.
- Message and Identity Infrastructure Monitoring: Splunk allows ITOps teams to track, audit, secure and analyze messages and identity infrastructure and workloads.
- Mobile Intelligence: Splunk empowers ITOps teams to share mobile data with developers, operations and line of business users.
- Operating System Monitoring: Splunk provides full operational visibility across Windows and Linux operating systems.
- Network and Server Support: Splunk enables ITOps teams to quickly review configurations, logs and other network and server data so they can detect and address problems before they escalate.
Additionally, ITOps teams can use Splunk for service desk to eliminate up to 90 percent of escalations and share data with colleagues to address common problems. Splunk for service desk empowers ITOps teams to index, search and analyze all their machine data from a single location, in real-time. Plus, the software enables ITOps teams to troubleshoot applications, investigate security incidents and meet compliance requirements.
The benefits of Splunk for service desk include:
- Index Logs: ITOps teams can index logs from email messages, network services, enterprise applications, web servers and all other critical IT services.
- Predefined Form Searches: ITOps teams can leverage predefined form searches to validate and diagnose lost emails, failed web transactions and other routine problems without escalating these issues to senior system administrators and engineers.
- Identification and Classification: ITOps teams can add saved searches, identify and classify events and transactions and extract fields over an extended period of time. This data empowers tier 1 staff to quickly diagnose problems and understand search results, as well as avoid escalations.
- Automated Searches: ITOps teams can automate searches to proactively find routine user and customer issues and notify service desk personnel about these issues via integrations with service desk and ticketing systems.
- Dashboards and Reports: ITOps teams can create dashboards and reports to monitor both user-impacting issues and diagnoses performed by tier 1 personnel using Splunk. Also, senior administrators and operations managers can review Splunk activity to identify trends and anomalies before they result in downtime, outages and other service problems.
Splunk for service desk helps ITOps teams go from reactive to proactive. It empowers ITOps teams to speed up problem analysis and resolution, minimize escalations and prevent a one-time issue from becoming a recurring problem. Moreover, Splunk for service desk helps ITOps teams reduce the risk of high MTTR, excessive escalations and limited data access that otherwise hamper business productivity and efficiency.
Does Your Incident Management System Integrate with Splunk?
Choosing an incident management system that offers a Splunk integration is paramount. In fact, integrating Splunk with an incident management system can help ITOps teams in a number of ways, such as:
- Fast Alerting: ITOps teams can send alerts directly from Splunk. This ensures ITOps team members won’t have to use multiple applications or platforms to deliver incident notifications to key stakeholders.
- Custom Messaging: A custom message can be sent with an alert using any field from an inbound JSON. ITOps teams also can map an inbound field to a custom field in their incident management system.
- Incident Tracking: ITOps teams can map any inbound field to the topic field in their incident monitoring system and use topics to track incidents and route incidents to the proper team members.
Integrating Splunk into an incident monitoring system enables ITOps teams to efficiently track and analyze incidents. Splunk gives ITOps teams the ability to review incident data, find out why incidents are happening and make informed incident management decisions. It enables ITOps teams to receive and respond to critical alerts via email, SMS, push notifications and phone alerts, too. Perhaps best of all, an incident management system uses escalation policies and on-call schedules to ensures alerts received via Splunk always reach the correct ITOps team members.
For IT Operations teams that want to deploy an alert monitoring system or upgrade their existing system, selecting a system that integrates with Splunk is ideal. With a combination of Splunk and an incident management system at its disposal, an ITOps team may be better equipped than ever before to reduce MTTR, foster collaboration and drive meaningful results across a business.
