Leading Admissions Service Independent Charity
- Higher availability
- Insight and visibility across systems
- Personal data security
Case Study Introduction
A charitable organisation responsible for managing applications to higher education institutions (HEIs) in the UK on behalf of its members. It processes over 650,000 applications from students each year. They needed to search and visualise a large volume of machine-generated data to streamline reporting, ensure service uptime and maintain service level agreements (SLAs). Since deploying Splunk Enterprise there have been a number of benefits, including:
- Higher availability of systems
- Insight and visibility across multiple systems
- Improved security of personal data
Business Challenges
Why Splunk?
Although active year-round operating application services, the service peaks in mid-August on A-level results day as students log in. This places much more pressure on IT infrastructure than at any other point of the year. In order to ensure site uptime and application performance, there were a number of challenges with collecting, searching and visualising a large volume of machine-generated data. Unfortunately, this was a laborious and time-consuming manual process that did not allow for the correlation of key system events. The IT Operations team was also tasked with improving monitoring and reporting across the IT landscape.
The IT team (application support, infrastructure support and architects) deployed Splunk software for troubleshooting, performance management and operational business analytics. The Splunk solution gives the IT team a series of visualisations of system performance, key operational metrics (broken down by HEI), their usage, the queries they are running and how the various applications are functioning. In addition, senior executives now use Splunk dashboards to get insight into key performance indicators (KPIs) and service level agreements (SLAs).
