2. About Me
Worked at Jolera for 2 years
Actually earned my Honours BA in
Religion and Culture
Always have had a passion for
technology
When not in front of computer I
enjoy running, yoga and cooking
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3. About Jolera
Information Technology Partner founded in 2001
60+ associates
Offers a multitude of services from a 24/7
service desk, onsite support as well as
infrastructure consulting and implementations
Recognized in PROFIT 100 Canada’s Fastest
Growing Companies for 2008, 2009, and 2010
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4. Challenge: Meeting SLA's
Managing a high availability virtual environment which hosts a
custom application for clients
Monitoring 10,000's transactions a month
SLA requirement to report on the round trip time of all
transactions
Had no way to report without manually wading through logs
We weren't meeting our SLA's
“Splunk gives us the granular reporting we need to run our business and
deliver on SLAs—it was painful before Splunk.”
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5. Anatomy of a Transaction
Back end web servers
Client Network
Firewall
Round trip time = <200ms
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6. Why Splunk?
Citrix Edgesight
– Uses http injection, complicated to setup and test
– Captures only full round trip information, wasn't granular
enough
Solarwinds
– Didn't capture more than an hour in the free tool, no plans
to integrate in the full paid version of the software
Splunk
– Ability to get granular reporting on Application
Performance
– Easy to set up, install and upgrade
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7. The Perfect Pair
Citrix Netscaler for load balancing and
pushing Appflow on configured virtual
servers
Splunk custom searches to analyze the
AppFlow data and measure time taken from
hop to hop of a round trip transaction
"Before Splunk we needed 4 hours to parse through logs –
now we only need minutes!"
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9. Data, Glorious Data!
Using Splunk with Citrix Appflow for Netscaler gave us complete
visibility to our data in one place without parsing logs!
– Request Host
– Request URL
– Request Method (POST vs. GET)
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10. Keeping Processes Humming
Custom Splunk Application and the
Citrix Applflow Splunk module provide:
– Monthly reports on SLAs
– Ability to set proactive alerts against
thresholds
To keep us ahead of our customers!
– Data is in searchable format
– Easy to create reports
– Ability to auto schedule reporting
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11. Endless Possibilities for Customization
SLA Dashboard for real time pass
and fail reporting
Saved custom searches and reports
Easy to use interactive pre-built
reports
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12. Future Plans
Splunk for Syslogging the firewall
Offer SLA reporting services to other custom application
customers or future customers
Monitor development environment to assist with future products
and releases
"Now we can check the environment health whenever we want."
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First time we started seeing the data – seeing all the information – IP address, what the request is – even before I had searches, round trip time; We were batteling with this for so long. And knowing we can report on a monthly bases. We were making stuff up because we had no idea. Additional logging – down fall appflow – Netscaler firewall; -> AHA moment not only do I have appflow also traffic can be pointed and parsed. Nobody likes exporting csv’s.
