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8 BIGGEST MISTAKES
IT PRACTITIONERS MAKE
AND HOW TO AVOID THEM
3
2 8 BIGGEST MISTAKES IT PRACTITIONERS MAKE 8 BIGGEST MISTAKES IT PRACTITIONERS MAKE
CONTENTS
THE STATE OF GLOBAL IT 4
MISTAKE #1: TOO MANY TOOLS 6
MISTAKE #2: IT AND BUSINESS FRICTION 8
MISTAKE #3: NO WAY TO EASILY
IDENTIFY ROOT CAUSE 10
MISTAKE #4: THE WRONG SKILLS TO
MANAGE APPLICATION COMPLEXITY 12
MISTAKE #5: LACK OF VISIBILITY
THROUGHOUT CLOUD MIGRATION 14
MISTAKE #6: OVERWHELMED
BY DATA SILOS 16
MISTAKE #7: NO PLANS FOR SYSTEM
FAILURE 18
MISTAKE #8: RELYING ON MANUAL
PROCESSES 20
WHAT DOES IT ACTUALLY DO ... AND
WHAT SHOULD IT ACTUALLY BE DOING? 22
TRANSFORMING IT 24
TOP 4 IT OPS VALUE DRIVERS 26
SPLUNK SOLUTIONS 28
CONCLUSION 30
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8 BIGGEST MISTAKES IT PRACTITIONERS MAKE
4 8 BIGGEST MISTAKES IT PRACTITIONERS MAKE
Imagine you’re the mythological character Sisyphus, forced
to roll a boulder up a hill. When it gets near the top, it always
rolls back down, so you have to keep repeating the same futile
exercise over and over. If you’re an IT professional in charge of
a complex, hybrid environment, this scenario probably sounds
familiar. Instead of helping move your organization forward, you
spend most of your time constantly trying to pinpoint and fix
one problem after another (eternally rolling boulders uphill).
Adding to the stress, all the pressure is on you to maintain
system availability and performance to keep business leaders
and customers happy.
You’re not alone. Across the world, IT professionals are in
charge of an increasing number of servers and data coming
in from disparate sources, and they’re using way too many
monitoring tools to make sense of it all. The 2018 report
Reducing Complexity in IT Infrastructure Monitoring: A Study
of Global Organizations by the Ponemon Institute* sheds light
on the challenges of troubleshooting and monitoring cloud and
on-premises environments. The Ponemon Institute polled 2,497
IT and IT security practitioners in the United States, the United
Kingdom, Germany, France, Australia, Singapore and Japan
about their infrastructure monitoring challenges.
When asked about the past year:
• Twenty-four percent said the handling of scale and complexity
of IT infrastructure has improved
• Twenty-nine percent said the ability to easily deploy and
maintain server monitoring technologies has improved
THE STATE OF GLOBAL IT:
IT DOESN’T HAVE TO BE AN
UPHILL BATTLE
The Ponemon survey also found that while a significant
percentage of IT practitioners are in charge of monitoring
over 50 servers, only 33 percent felt that they could ensure
performance and system availability with their current toolset.
So how can IT effectively manage increasingly complex, hybrid
environments, and what are the major missteps IT organizations
can correct to build a more efficient approach to infrastructure
monitoring and troubleshooting?
This guide outlines the 8 biggest mistakes IT practitioners
make and provides solutions, key takeaways, and real-world
examples to help improve IT monitoring and troubleshooting in
your organization.
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6 8 BIGGEST MISTAKES IT PRACTITIONERS MAKE 8 BIGGEST MISTAKES IT PRACTITIONERS MAKE
ENGIE
BEFORE: Resolving issues became time-consuming and
inefficient for ENGIE because its development and infrastructure
teams were using different monitoring tools, which required too
much back-and-forth between the two teams.
AFTER: By deploying Splunk Enterprise and Splunk IT Service
Intelligence (ITSI), the large energy company gained a holistic
view of the health of key business services, faster resolution of
business-impacting issues, and improved collaboration between
development and infrastructure teams during incident triage.
SMSGlobal
BEFORE: An online service company, SMS Global struggled with
information access because many applications were integrated
with different devices — such as Cisco network devices and
ASA appliances — and every system generated logs in different
formats and locations.
AFTER: The company now uses Splunk Enterprise to collect,
index and harness operational data across its infrastructure for
in-depth, real-time visibility. Compliance reporting that required
10 people and days to complete now takes only one admin and
seconds to complete. The company also gained full visibility
into its Microsoft Exchange environment with the Splunk App
for Microsoft Exchange. SMSGlobal can now monitor email
movement across the entire IT infrastructure in real time, cutting
the time it used to take to correlate events from firewalls,
Exchange or ad logs from days to minutes.
MISTAKE #1:
TOO MANY TOOLS
Seventy percent of IT professionals in the survey said that using
data to determine root cause slows them down — ingesting and
normalizing data of differing formats and types is tedious and
unmanageable, and it’s difficult to make real-time decisions. This
is often because companies use too many monitoring tools for
single layers of their IT stack, such as networks or applications,
which creates silos and inefficiencies. When data lives inside one
tool but can’t access or communicate with data confined to other
tools, IT practitioners lose context on what’s happening in their
environment because they’re seeing only a part of the picture.
The Solution
How can companies improve their approach to IT infrastructure
monitoring? IT practitioners said the most influential factors
when choosing an infrastructure monitoring and troubleshooting
strategy are:
• Simplification of IT complexity through consolidation of
technologies and systems
• Automation of IT maintenance and management processes
More than ever, it’s critical to monitor performance across hybrid
architectures with a tool that collects and correlates data from all
sources. Multiple, fragmented monitoring solutions don’t provide
the visibility and intelligence needed to meet business and IT
goals. So what’s the solution to too many tools and disparate data?
The answer is a single, scalable monitoring tool that provides end-
to-end operational visibility into hybrid environments. Let’s take a
look at how two companies solved the problem.
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8 BIGGEST MISTAKES IT PRACTITIONERS MAKE 8 BIGGEST MISTAKES IT PRACTITIONERS MAKE
Micron Technology, Inc.
BEFORE: Growing manufacturing company Micron struggled
with production and shipping delays due to its lack of
enterprise-wide visibility across the entire IT infrastructure.
AFTER: The company adopted an analytics-driven approach
with Splunk to transform its IT operations and business,
resulting in a reduction of business-impacting IT incidents by
more than 50 percent, mean-time-to-resolve IT incidents by 32
percent and the number of major IT incidents by 23 percent.
Networld Technology Ltd.
BEFORE: The IT team at online services provider Networld
Technology was under pressure due to time-consuming data
aggregation procedures that delayed business decisions, such
as insufficient searching and monitoring for analytics and the
lack of a centralized view of sales performance and revenue. Its
business team needed to centrally monitor the overall trends of
various retail brands, and identify the top products, categories
and merchants for business management purposes.
AFTER: With Splunk Enterprise, Networld replaced manual
reporting with powerful dashboards that show all of this
information in real time and in a user-friendly graphical
interface that keeps track of the overall performance of the
website. Operations became more efficient due to end-to-end
visibility into business processes, and real-time revenue analysis
generated new business opportunities.
MISTAKE #2:
IT AND BUSINESS FRICTION
As digital business infrastructure increases in complexity,
IT teams feel more pressure than ever to reduce business-
impacting incidents. When IT systems fail, the ramifications go
beyond the immediate financial loss of downtime — a business
could lose customers and jeopardize its reputation, a harsh
reality that keeps IT teams up day and night. According to
Ponemon’s research, 61 percent of IT professionals say that lack
of system availability and poor performance creates friction
between IT and lines of business.
The Solution
How can an IT team keep business professionals and decision
makers happy and on their side? By ensuring 24/7 system
availability and high performance, of course. But that’s only
achievable when IT has the ability to quickly isolate, identify
and fix issues before they become a problem. In addition to a
solution that allows IT to find the root cause to identify service
interruptions, IT and business need to work together to design
business and technical requirements in tandem.
Here are some real-world examples of companies that decreased
friction between IT and the business.
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8 BIGGEST MISTAKES IT PRACTITIONERS MAKE
10 8 BIGGEST MISTAKES IT PRACTITIONERS MAKE 11
8 BIGGEST MISTAKES IT PRACTITIONERS MAKE
Advanced MD
BEFORE: A cloud-based provider for medical professionals,
AdvancedMD lacked visibility into service-related systems
when issues occurred, resulting in long detection and
remediation times.
AFTER: The company deployed Splunk ITSI to ensure the
performance and availability of services, gaining faster MTTR
and increased reliability with Splunk’s consolidated views into
workflows and components.
Hyatt
BEFORE: The hotel chain’s online check-in experience wasn’t
reliable due to a time-consuming troubleshooting process.
AFTER: To speed up detection time, Hyatt adopted Splunk
Enterprise and the Machine Learning Toolkit (MLTK) and gained
centralized, real-time visibility — dashboards and alerts help the
IT team see an issue before a ticket is even opened.
MISTAKE #3:
NO WAY TO EASILY
IDENTIFY ROOT CAUSE
Across the globe, IT professionals spend their days identifying
and fixing server environment problems. Indeed, the Ponemon
survey found that the top two challenges of troubleshooting,
monitoring and cloud migration are:
• Lack of insights to quickly pinpoint issues and identify the
root cause
• Complexity and diversity of IT systems and technology
When IT can’t find and fix issues quickly, it has a direct effect on
the business.
The Solution
In order for IT to quickly fix problems, they need a monitoring tool
that can surface an issue’s root cause with an alert about where
and why something is wrong. Issue resolution time can be cut in
half with a monitoring solution that correlates metrics and logs and
provides visualizations of alerts, trends and logs in one place.
Making sure your monitoring tool can enable those types of actions
and resolution planning is critical for success. Read on to learn how
two companies succeeded in speeding root cause analysis.
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8 BIGGEST MISTAKES IT PRACTITIONERS MAKE
12 8 BIGGEST MISTAKES IT PRACTITIONERS MAKE
The Solution
How can organizations ensure their IT teams are able to
effectively troubleshoot, monitor and migrate to the cloud? A
solid plan that takes future growth into account is necessary for
smooth IT operations. Business and IT need to work together to
create an IT environment roadmap, followed by a talent strategy
that aligns to that plan. Be sure to:
• Identify skills gaps and adjust hiring
• Identify and train qualified employees for advancement
• Include succession planning for inevitable changes
MISTAKE #4:
THE WRONG SKILLS TO
MANAGE APPLICATION
COMPLEXITY
When Ponemon asked IT professionals about the biggest risks to
their ability to troubleshoot, monitor and migrate to the cloud:
• Fifty-five percent said the increasing complexity of
applications running on infrastructure
• Forty-four percent said a lack of skills and expertise to deal
with application complexity
As infrastructure grows and evolves, it becomes increasingly
difficult for IT teams to successfully manage, monitor and
troubleshoot systems. Couple that with an IT skills gap that
makes it difficult for organizations to attract and retain qualified
talent, and it becomes clear why IT teams feel non-stop pressure.
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8 BIGGEST MISTAKES IT PRACTITIONERS MAKE
14 8 BIGGEST MISTAKES IT PRACTITIONERS MAKE
REI
BEFORE: When REI wanted to extend its security posture to include
edge protection of its Amazon Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs) as
it migrated applications to Amazon Web Services (AWS), the
company realized it needed to gain edge protection and close a
security gap during cloud migration by ensuring real-time visibility
across applications, services and security infrastructure.
AFTER: REI deployed Splunk Cloud and Amazon GuardDuty
service across its hybrid environment and has seen benefits
including end-to-end security visibility during AWS cloud
migration and real-time insight into potential threats.
TrueCar
BEFORE: TrueCar, a digital automotive marketplace, was
using an open-source log management tool that took many
hours to maintain.
AFTER: When the company switched to Splunk Cloud, it freed
up the infrastructure team’s time so they could tackle other
problems. The team now relies on Splunk Cloud for monitoring
all core infrastructure and application delivery across the
organization. Dashboards provide visibility into AWS billing,
enabling the team to better control costs and allocate resources
effectively throughout cloud migration without needing to
manage the infrastructure.
When it comes to migration expense, cost management tools
offer current and historical instance usage and show unused
resources. But it’s vital to have full infrastructure economics for
strong resource forecasts and intelligent migration decisions.
For more information on creating an effective migration
strategy, including predicting and managing costs, see the guide
How to Get Your Cloud Migration Strategy Right.
MISTAKE #5:
LACK OF VISIBILITY
THROUGHOUT CLOUD
MIGRATION
What’s the biggest cloud migration headache? Sixty-eight
percent of IT practitioners said that ensuring application
performance and availability throughout cloud migration
caused the most stress. Over half said both cost and the
inability to monitor and troubleshoot applications were their
biggest pain points.
As infrastructure increases in complexity, the core
responsibilities of IT to monitor and measure remain the same.
So how can IT achieve infrastructure visibility and workload
insights when performance data spans diverse environments?
The Solution
It’s critical to monitor performance across hybrid architectures
with a monitoring solution that collects and correlates data
from every location. Full visibility is needed throughout the
migration process, so choose an end-to-end monitoring tool that
allows you to establish a pre-migration baseline, mid-migration
insights and post-migration success. Before cloud migration,
measure the baseline user experience and performance, and
define acceptable post-migration levels. To accurately validate
a migration’s success, use the same monitoring tool throughout
the migration process. A unified tool can analyze centralized
data and provide better insights from dashboards and reports.
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Leidos
BEFORE: The IT team at science and technology solutions
leader Leidos struggled to find and fix glitches before customer
experience was negatively affected, because they had to find
patterns and trends in siloed data and triage a flood of events
spanning more than 120 IT services.
AFTER: After adopting Splunk, the company was able to see
data across its entire service stack, consolidate events from a
heterogeneous IT environment, detect and suppress duplicate
alerts, clear solved alerts and distill them down to actionable
events. Splunk helps the company boil 3,500 to 5,000 daily
alerts down to roughly 50 tickets for network and data center
operations to act on.
Micron
BEFORE: Micron found it difficult to maintain service quality
to remain competitive because data silos limited the ability to
identify, resolve and prevent IT issues.
AFTER: The technology company adopted an analytics-
driven approach with Splunk to transform its IT operations
and business, which dramatically reduced time-to-resolve
and number of IT incidents. Real-time visibility now enables
engineering teams to share data and expertise, and a new IT
operations strategy enables the company to catch issues early
to avoid business impacts.
MISTAKE #6:
OVERWHELMED BY
DATA SILOS
As infrastructure evolves into a mix of mainframe, client-server,
virtualized, serverless and hybrid cloud, the potential for silos
and blind spots increases. When Ponemon asked IT professionals
about the greatest difficulties of managing IT infrastructure,
complexity and diversity of IT systems and technology was
highest on the list.
Infrastructure complexity affects IT’s ability to quickly determine
root cause of an issue. When asked about challenges faced when
trying to determine root cause, 63 percent of IT practitioners
said that ingesting data from different formats and making sense
of it to diagnose and determine root cause is problematic, while
56 percent said they weren’t even sure what data was relevant
for specific problems that arise.
The Solution
To avoid silos and banish blind spots, IT needs a single
infrastructure monitoring and troubleshooting solution that can
ingest and correlate data from any source. Instead of separate
monitoring and log analytics tools, a single solution that unifies
and correlates metrics and logs will speed up root cause
identification. Let’s take a look at how two companies solved
their data silo problems.
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18 8 BIGGEST MISTAKES IT PRACTITIONERS MAKE 8 BIGGEST MISTAKES IT PRACTITIONERS MAKE
The Solution
Organizations need to prepare for the worst by putting an
IT system failure contingency plan in place. Ownership and
responsibilities should be clearly defined, and IT should
document a plan for each potential technology failure scenario.
It’s vital to continually test a system contingency plan to make
sure it works, and keep in mind that any contingency plan will
need to be refined as infrastructure changes. It’s imperative to
deliver the right information to the right person — or teams —
at the right time.
MISTAKE #7:
NO PLANS FOR
SYSTEM FAILURE
Most companies aren’t prepared to respond to interruptions
or loss of service. According to the Ponemon study, only 29
percent of IT practitioners said their organization has:
• Documented workflows and automated processes to follow
when a system failure occurs
• The ability to pinpoint problems early because of the
adoption of automation and current monitoring tool sets
The longer it takes to resolve an incident, the longer customers
suffer through poor customer experiences and organizations
suffer negative business impacts, like loss of revenue. Without
documented, ready-to-execute incident management plans,
organizations spend precious resolution time responding to
potentially recurring issues rather than reflecting and learning.
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20 8 BIGGEST MISTAKES IT PRACTITIONERS MAKE 8 BIGGEST MISTAKES IT PRACTITIONERS MAKE
Forty-six percent said it will improve their ability to deliver
projects on schedule, while 45 percent said it will improve their
ability to maintain service quality.
Moving from from a state of reactive monitoring to proactive,
real-time monitoring is achievable with the right tool, as the
companies mentioned next learned.
SONIFI
BEFORE: A technology integrator that services the hospitality
and healthcare industries, SONIFI needed a solution for manual
and tedious processes that made it difficult to make data-
informed decisions.
AFTER: Since deploying Splunk Enterprise and taking advantage
of new features, including metrics and event annotation, SONIFI
has seen an annual savings of $85,000 by centralizing reports
and implementing more efficient processes, a $100,000 monthly
savings thanks to new insights into its billing decisions, and a
reduction in reporting time from days to minutes.
ROKT
BEFORE: The IT team at online services company ROKT was
spending hours manually managing its diversified range of logs,
such as user, access, load balancer, CloudTrail, system, customer
and transaction logs.
AFTER: Splunk has refined log management for the company.
As a centralized log analysis tool for machine-generated
data as well as unstructured and structured data, it enables
IT managers to automatically index, correlate and monitor all
logs across virtual and non-virtual environments from a single
location, turning manual searches into automated real-time
alerts, graphical reports, and intuitive dashboards with only a
few mouse clicks. What took the team hours to finish has now
become minutes of computer operation, allowing the business
to further grow and scale.
MISTAKE #8:
RELYING ON MANUAL
PROCESSES
All over the world, IT teams spend too much time on manual tasks
such as performing searches, managing daily logs, troubleshooting
issues, creating analysis and compliance reports and more. Lack
of visibility across the entire infrastructure is forcing IT teams
to perform time-consuming manual processes in a reactive
state. Only 30 percent of IT practitioners say their organization
proactively gathers information from various intelligence sources
to understand what the issues are before an outage.
In addition to resource allocation challenges, relying on manual
processes results in longer mean time to resolution (MTTR),
which can negatively affect customer experience and create
friction between IT and the business.
The Solution
So how can IT move from reactive to proactive? Infrastructure
monitoring complexity can be reduced with monitoring tools
that allow for monitoring and troubleshooting in the cloud or
an on-premises environment. When it comes to the feature that
IT professionals desire the most in a monitoring solution, it’s
no surprise that 87 percent of IT practitioners said they want
automated, machine-learning based investigations that enable
them to quickly and easily find trends and root causes. Other
key features to look for in a monitoring solution are that it can
be used across teams, use cases and hybrid environments, and
that installation and deployment is easy.
In addition to helping IT spend more time making improvements
instead of fixing what’s broken, implementing automation and
operational analytics will improve the ability to deliver projects
within budget, according to 51 percent of IT practitioners.
23
8 BIGGEST MISTAKES IT PRACTITIONERS MAKE
22 8 BIGGEST MISTAKES IT PRACTITIONERS MAKE
What should IT really be focused on?
• Avoiding outages
• Improving customer experience
• Providing agility and adapting to ever-changing business needs
So how can IT become less reactive and more proactive?
Switching from reactive monitoring and troubleshooting
to proactive becomes possible with an analytics-driven
monitoring solution such as Splunk, which allows for intelligent
investigations to speed up root cause analysis.
WHAT DOES IT ACTUALLY
DO... AND WHAT SHOULD IT
ACTUALLY BE DOING?
With so many servers, applications and events to monitor, IT
professionals are overwhelmed trying to meet performance
and availability expectations. They’re also being asked to meet
business requirements, to build and deliver everything faster,
and to make it higher quality and more efficient across the
entire structure. And, they’re supposed to do all that with fewer
resources — most on-premises and cloud IT budgets aren’t likely
to increase over the next year, according to responses to the
Ponemon survey.
When you consider that IT is responsible for managing large
portfolios comprised of increasingly complex and stacked
technologies, answering to business, fulfilling service requests
and fixing problems in production when things break, it
becomes clear that it’s difficult for IT to meet organizational
demands without changing their approach from purely reactive
monitoring to proactive — or even predictive — monitoring.
25
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8 BIGGEST MISTAKES IT PRACTITIONERS MAKE
24 8 BIGGEST MISTAKES IT PRACTITIONERS MAKE
How Can Splunk Help Solve Infrastructure
Monitoring Pain Points?
Our customers have experienced significant improvements in
monitoring and troubleshooting with Splunk, including:
• Improved detection times
• Faster triage and investigation
• Service restored more quickly
• Faster root cause analysis so they can document trends in
incident response and plan accordingly
Splunk customers also see cost savings related to infrastructure
capacity utilization and are able to find gaps of efficiency
instead of just troubleshooting.
TRANSFORMING IT:
SPEEDING DETECTION,
INVESTIGATION AND
RESOLUTION WITH
PROACTIVE MONITORING
At Splunk, we hear from one customer after another that
constantly changing demands require a new approach to
infrastructure monitoring. From financial services to healthcare,
manufacturing, telecommunications, even technology — IT
teams in every industry we work with struggle with lack of
visibility and insight across the entire infrastructure, tedious
investigations and slow mean time to resolution.
What Customers Say About Infrastructure Monitoring
Challenges
Monitoring and
Troubleshooting
in Silos
Increasing
Complexity Makes It
Harder to Find and
Fix Problems
Spending Too Much
Time Administering
Monitoring Software
“Why am I
monitoring with
one tool and
troubleshooting
with another?”
“Applications
keep getting more
complex and I’m
required to monitor
more than ever and
find problems faster!”
“We don’t have
enough resources
to buy and maintain
complex monitoring
tools.”
27
26 8 BIGGEST MISTAKES IT PRACTITIONERS MAKE 8 BIGGEST MISTAKES IT PRACTITIONERS MAKE
#4 Faster and more
comprehensive root
cause analysis reduces
incident recurrence
Root cause
analysis
Up to 30% unknown
root causes, causing
incidents to recur
Incident
troubleshooting
Lengthy log analysis done manually
Incident
triage
All hands on deck,
taking up 30 to 40
minutes
Failure
detection
Customer often
informs IT
BEFORE SPLUNK
Service
restoration
Fix is implemented
Fix is implemented
#1 Better detection
customer is notified
by IT
WITH SPLUNK
#2 Faster triage often
conducted by 1st level staff
without all hands on deck
#3 Faster investigation (MTTI) through rapid log
search and correlation conducted in conjunction by
different teams (everyone looks at the same data)
Customer Feedback:
• 15–45% reduction in high
priority incidents
• 70–90% reduction in
incident investigation time
• 67–82% reduction in
business impact
• 5–20% increase in
infrastructure capacity
utilization
TOP 4 IT OPS
VALUE DRIVERS
29
8 BIGGEST MISTAKES IT PRACTITIONERS MAKE
28 8 BIGGEST MISTAKES IT PRACTITIONERS MAKE
“Splunk Insights for Infrastructure cleverly
combines metrics and logging for a more
complete view of infrastructure performance.
We can see unusual behavior such as a CPU
spike and correlate it with logs to troubleshoot
problems much more quickly.”
— Daryl Robbins, Sr. Cloud Architect, Entrust Datacard
SPLUNK SOLUTIONS
Splunk offers “Insights” products for brand new Splunk users
that are designed for a specific use case. Splunk Insights for
Infrastructure (SII) is a powerful, easy-to-use server monitoring
tool that doesn’t limit the number of users, hosts or alerts
provided. SII seamlessly unifies metrics (for monitoring) and
logs (for troubleshooting) — from AWS, Linux and Windows
environments — all in one user experience. Correlate metrics
and logs together across many different out-of-the-box
dashboards and visualizations, group things by entity and get
to root cause more quickly. It’s easy to download, install and get
insights within minutes using prebuilt, lightning-fast dashboards.
No more swiveling between different monitoring tools. SII starts
out free, then is competitively priced in annual contracts for
more retention.
For existing Splunk Enterprise customers, the Splunk App for
Infrastructure offers the same experience as Splunk Insights for
Infrastructure but also has platform capabilities, such as:
• Indexing metrics natively, efficiently and at scale
• Splunk’s powerful SPL query language (Search and
Reporting app)
• Role-based access controls
• The ability to correlate server metrics and logs with data from
all layers of the IT stack
31
30 8 BIGGEST MISTAKES IT PRACTITIONERS MAKE 8 BIGGEST MISTAKES IT PRACTITIONERS MAKE
It’s easy to get started with Splunk:
Splunk Insights for Infrastructure is available as a free download
and includes a 200GB storage license that can monitor
approximately 50 servers (depending on your environment and
how much per server you monitor) and community support.
There’s no time limit on the download, which means you can
use the software perpetually — for free! You can buy additional
storage that includes basic support from splunk.com or your
preferred Splunk reseller partner. Get started today at splunk.
com/insights-for-infrastructure.
Splunk App for Infrastructure is for existing Splunk customers
who already have an Enterprise deployment and license. It’s
available for download on Splunkbase.
*Reducing Complexity in IT infrastructure Monitoring: A Study of Global
Organizations. Ponemon Institute, LLC. Publication date: April 2018
CONCLUSION
From lack of visibility during cloud migration to reliance on
manual processes, organizations face an uphill battle when it
comes to troubleshooting and monitoring hybrid environments.
It’s clear that IT needs a solution that will enable them to
effectively manage increasingly complex, environments — one
that will take it from reactive to proactive IT and eventually,
predictive IT.
Splunk addresses many of the IT challenges you face by providing:
• Correlated metrics and logs for improved monitoring and faster
troubleshooting
• Seamless metric- and log-based monitoring and
troubleshooting
• Automated investigations to find trends and root causes easier
© 2018 Splunk Inc. All rights reserved. Splunk, Splunk>, Listen to Your Data, The Engine for Machine Data,Splunk Cloud, Splunk
Light and SPL are trademarks and registered trademarks of Splunk Inc. in the United States and other countries.
EB-Splunk-8-Biggest-Mistakes-IT-Practitioners-Make-101
GET STARTED.
www.splunk.com/insights-for-infrastructure

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8 BIGGEST MISTAKES IT PRACTITIONERS MAKE AND HOW TO AVOID THEM

  • 1. 8 BIGGEST MISTAKES IT PRACTITIONERS MAKE AND HOW TO AVOID THEM
  • 2. 3 2 8 BIGGEST MISTAKES IT PRACTITIONERS MAKE 8 BIGGEST MISTAKES IT PRACTITIONERS MAKE CONTENTS THE STATE OF GLOBAL IT 4 MISTAKE #1: TOO MANY TOOLS 6 MISTAKE #2: IT AND BUSINESS FRICTION 8 MISTAKE #3: NO WAY TO EASILY IDENTIFY ROOT CAUSE 10 MISTAKE #4: THE WRONG SKILLS TO MANAGE APPLICATION COMPLEXITY 12 MISTAKE #5: LACK OF VISIBILITY THROUGHOUT CLOUD MIGRATION 14 MISTAKE #6: OVERWHELMED BY DATA SILOS 16 MISTAKE #7: NO PLANS FOR SYSTEM FAILURE 18 MISTAKE #8: RELYING ON MANUAL PROCESSES 20 WHAT DOES IT ACTUALLY DO ... AND WHAT SHOULD IT ACTUALLY BE DOING? 22 TRANSFORMING IT 24 TOP 4 IT OPS VALUE DRIVERS 26 SPLUNK SOLUTIONS 28 CONCLUSION 30
  • 3. 5 8 BIGGEST MISTAKES IT PRACTITIONERS MAKE 4 8 BIGGEST MISTAKES IT PRACTITIONERS MAKE Imagine you’re the mythological character Sisyphus, forced to roll a boulder up a hill. When it gets near the top, it always rolls back down, so you have to keep repeating the same futile exercise over and over. If you’re an IT professional in charge of a complex, hybrid environment, this scenario probably sounds familiar. Instead of helping move your organization forward, you spend most of your time constantly trying to pinpoint and fix one problem after another (eternally rolling boulders uphill). Adding to the stress, all the pressure is on you to maintain system availability and performance to keep business leaders and customers happy. You’re not alone. Across the world, IT professionals are in charge of an increasing number of servers and data coming in from disparate sources, and they’re using way too many monitoring tools to make sense of it all. The 2018 report Reducing Complexity in IT Infrastructure Monitoring: A Study of Global Organizations by the Ponemon Institute* sheds light on the challenges of troubleshooting and monitoring cloud and on-premises environments. The Ponemon Institute polled 2,497 IT and IT security practitioners in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Australia, Singapore and Japan about their infrastructure monitoring challenges. When asked about the past year: • Twenty-four percent said the handling of scale and complexity of IT infrastructure has improved • Twenty-nine percent said the ability to easily deploy and maintain server monitoring technologies has improved THE STATE OF GLOBAL IT: IT DOESN’T HAVE TO BE AN UPHILL BATTLE The Ponemon survey also found that while a significant percentage of IT practitioners are in charge of monitoring over 50 servers, only 33 percent felt that they could ensure performance and system availability with their current toolset. So how can IT effectively manage increasingly complex, hybrid environments, and what are the major missteps IT organizations can correct to build a more efficient approach to infrastructure monitoring and troubleshooting? This guide outlines the 8 biggest mistakes IT practitioners make and provides solutions, key takeaways, and real-world examples to help improve IT monitoring and troubleshooting in your organization.
  • 4. 7 6 8 BIGGEST MISTAKES IT PRACTITIONERS MAKE 8 BIGGEST MISTAKES IT PRACTITIONERS MAKE ENGIE BEFORE: Resolving issues became time-consuming and inefficient for ENGIE because its development and infrastructure teams were using different monitoring tools, which required too much back-and-forth between the two teams. AFTER: By deploying Splunk Enterprise and Splunk IT Service Intelligence (ITSI), the large energy company gained a holistic view of the health of key business services, faster resolution of business-impacting issues, and improved collaboration between development and infrastructure teams during incident triage. SMSGlobal BEFORE: An online service company, SMS Global struggled with information access because many applications were integrated with different devices — such as Cisco network devices and ASA appliances — and every system generated logs in different formats and locations. AFTER: The company now uses Splunk Enterprise to collect, index and harness operational data across its infrastructure for in-depth, real-time visibility. Compliance reporting that required 10 people and days to complete now takes only one admin and seconds to complete. The company also gained full visibility into its Microsoft Exchange environment with the Splunk App for Microsoft Exchange. SMSGlobal can now monitor email movement across the entire IT infrastructure in real time, cutting the time it used to take to correlate events from firewalls, Exchange or ad logs from days to minutes. MISTAKE #1: TOO MANY TOOLS Seventy percent of IT professionals in the survey said that using data to determine root cause slows them down — ingesting and normalizing data of differing formats and types is tedious and unmanageable, and it’s difficult to make real-time decisions. This is often because companies use too many monitoring tools for single layers of their IT stack, such as networks or applications, which creates silos and inefficiencies. When data lives inside one tool but can’t access or communicate with data confined to other tools, IT practitioners lose context on what’s happening in their environment because they’re seeing only a part of the picture. The Solution How can companies improve their approach to IT infrastructure monitoring? IT practitioners said the most influential factors when choosing an infrastructure monitoring and troubleshooting strategy are: • Simplification of IT complexity through consolidation of technologies and systems • Automation of IT maintenance and management processes More than ever, it’s critical to monitor performance across hybrid architectures with a tool that collects and correlates data from all sources. Multiple, fragmented monitoring solutions don’t provide the visibility and intelligence needed to meet business and IT goals. So what’s the solution to too many tools and disparate data? The answer is a single, scalable monitoring tool that provides end- to-end operational visibility into hybrid environments. Let’s take a look at how two companies solved the problem.
  • 5. 9 8 9 8 BIGGEST MISTAKES IT PRACTITIONERS MAKE 8 BIGGEST MISTAKES IT PRACTITIONERS MAKE Micron Technology, Inc. BEFORE: Growing manufacturing company Micron struggled with production and shipping delays due to its lack of enterprise-wide visibility across the entire IT infrastructure. AFTER: The company adopted an analytics-driven approach with Splunk to transform its IT operations and business, resulting in a reduction of business-impacting IT incidents by more than 50 percent, mean-time-to-resolve IT incidents by 32 percent and the number of major IT incidents by 23 percent. Networld Technology Ltd. BEFORE: The IT team at online services provider Networld Technology was under pressure due to time-consuming data aggregation procedures that delayed business decisions, such as insufficient searching and monitoring for analytics and the lack of a centralized view of sales performance and revenue. Its business team needed to centrally monitor the overall trends of various retail brands, and identify the top products, categories and merchants for business management purposes. AFTER: With Splunk Enterprise, Networld replaced manual reporting with powerful dashboards that show all of this information in real time and in a user-friendly graphical interface that keeps track of the overall performance of the website. Operations became more efficient due to end-to-end visibility into business processes, and real-time revenue analysis generated new business opportunities. MISTAKE #2: IT AND BUSINESS FRICTION As digital business infrastructure increases in complexity, IT teams feel more pressure than ever to reduce business- impacting incidents. When IT systems fail, the ramifications go beyond the immediate financial loss of downtime — a business could lose customers and jeopardize its reputation, a harsh reality that keeps IT teams up day and night. According to Ponemon’s research, 61 percent of IT professionals say that lack of system availability and poor performance creates friction between IT and lines of business. The Solution How can an IT team keep business professionals and decision makers happy and on their side? By ensuring 24/7 system availability and high performance, of course. But that’s only achievable when IT has the ability to quickly isolate, identify and fix issues before they become a problem. In addition to a solution that allows IT to find the root cause to identify service interruptions, IT and business need to work together to design business and technical requirements in tandem. Here are some real-world examples of companies that decreased friction between IT and the business.
  • 6. 11 8 BIGGEST MISTAKES IT PRACTITIONERS MAKE 10 8 BIGGEST MISTAKES IT PRACTITIONERS MAKE 11 8 BIGGEST MISTAKES IT PRACTITIONERS MAKE Advanced MD BEFORE: A cloud-based provider for medical professionals, AdvancedMD lacked visibility into service-related systems when issues occurred, resulting in long detection and remediation times. AFTER: The company deployed Splunk ITSI to ensure the performance and availability of services, gaining faster MTTR and increased reliability with Splunk’s consolidated views into workflows and components. Hyatt BEFORE: The hotel chain’s online check-in experience wasn’t reliable due to a time-consuming troubleshooting process. AFTER: To speed up detection time, Hyatt adopted Splunk Enterprise and the Machine Learning Toolkit (MLTK) and gained centralized, real-time visibility — dashboards and alerts help the IT team see an issue before a ticket is even opened. MISTAKE #3: NO WAY TO EASILY IDENTIFY ROOT CAUSE Across the globe, IT professionals spend their days identifying and fixing server environment problems. Indeed, the Ponemon survey found that the top two challenges of troubleshooting, monitoring and cloud migration are: • Lack of insights to quickly pinpoint issues and identify the root cause • Complexity and diversity of IT systems and technology When IT can’t find and fix issues quickly, it has a direct effect on the business. The Solution In order for IT to quickly fix problems, they need a monitoring tool that can surface an issue’s root cause with an alert about where and why something is wrong. Issue resolution time can be cut in half with a monitoring solution that correlates metrics and logs and provides visualizations of alerts, trends and logs in one place. Making sure your monitoring tool can enable those types of actions and resolution planning is critical for success. Read on to learn how two companies succeeded in speeding root cause analysis.
  • 7. 13 13 8 BIGGEST MISTAKES IT PRACTITIONERS MAKE 12 8 BIGGEST MISTAKES IT PRACTITIONERS MAKE The Solution How can organizations ensure their IT teams are able to effectively troubleshoot, monitor and migrate to the cloud? A solid plan that takes future growth into account is necessary for smooth IT operations. Business and IT need to work together to create an IT environment roadmap, followed by a talent strategy that aligns to that plan. Be sure to: • Identify skills gaps and adjust hiring • Identify and train qualified employees for advancement • Include succession planning for inevitable changes MISTAKE #4: THE WRONG SKILLS TO MANAGE APPLICATION COMPLEXITY When Ponemon asked IT professionals about the biggest risks to their ability to troubleshoot, monitor and migrate to the cloud: • Fifty-five percent said the increasing complexity of applications running on infrastructure • Forty-four percent said a lack of skills and expertise to deal with application complexity As infrastructure grows and evolves, it becomes increasingly difficult for IT teams to successfully manage, monitor and troubleshoot systems. Couple that with an IT skills gap that makes it difficult for organizations to attract and retain qualified talent, and it becomes clear why IT teams feel non-stop pressure.
  • 8. 15 8 BIGGEST MISTAKES IT PRACTITIONERS MAKE 14 8 BIGGEST MISTAKES IT PRACTITIONERS MAKE REI BEFORE: When REI wanted to extend its security posture to include edge protection of its Amazon Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs) as it migrated applications to Amazon Web Services (AWS), the company realized it needed to gain edge protection and close a security gap during cloud migration by ensuring real-time visibility across applications, services and security infrastructure. AFTER: REI deployed Splunk Cloud and Amazon GuardDuty service across its hybrid environment and has seen benefits including end-to-end security visibility during AWS cloud migration and real-time insight into potential threats. TrueCar BEFORE: TrueCar, a digital automotive marketplace, was using an open-source log management tool that took many hours to maintain. AFTER: When the company switched to Splunk Cloud, it freed up the infrastructure team’s time so they could tackle other problems. The team now relies on Splunk Cloud for monitoring all core infrastructure and application delivery across the organization. Dashboards provide visibility into AWS billing, enabling the team to better control costs and allocate resources effectively throughout cloud migration without needing to manage the infrastructure. When it comes to migration expense, cost management tools offer current and historical instance usage and show unused resources. But it’s vital to have full infrastructure economics for strong resource forecasts and intelligent migration decisions. For more information on creating an effective migration strategy, including predicting and managing costs, see the guide How to Get Your Cloud Migration Strategy Right. MISTAKE #5: LACK OF VISIBILITY THROUGHOUT CLOUD MIGRATION What’s the biggest cloud migration headache? Sixty-eight percent of IT practitioners said that ensuring application performance and availability throughout cloud migration caused the most stress. Over half said both cost and the inability to monitor and troubleshoot applications were their biggest pain points. As infrastructure increases in complexity, the core responsibilities of IT to monitor and measure remain the same. So how can IT achieve infrastructure visibility and workload insights when performance data spans diverse environments? The Solution It’s critical to monitor performance across hybrid architectures with a monitoring solution that collects and correlates data from every location. Full visibility is needed throughout the migration process, so choose an end-to-end monitoring tool that allows you to establish a pre-migration baseline, mid-migration insights and post-migration success. Before cloud migration, measure the baseline user experience and performance, and define acceptable post-migration levels. To accurately validate a migration’s success, use the same monitoring tool throughout the migration process. A unified tool can analyze centralized data and provide better insights from dashboards and reports.
  • 9. 17 16 8 BIGGEST MISTAKES IT PRACTITIONERS MAKE 8 BIGGEST MISTAKES IT PRACTITIONERS MAKE Leidos BEFORE: The IT team at science and technology solutions leader Leidos struggled to find and fix glitches before customer experience was negatively affected, because they had to find patterns and trends in siloed data and triage a flood of events spanning more than 120 IT services. AFTER: After adopting Splunk, the company was able to see data across its entire service stack, consolidate events from a heterogeneous IT environment, detect and suppress duplicate alerts, clear solved alerts and distill them down to actionable events. Splunk helps the company boil 3,500 to 5,000 daily alerts down to roughly 50 tickets for network and data center operations to act on. Micron BEFORE: Micron found it difficult to maintain service quality to remain competitive because data silos limited the ability to identify, resolve and prevent IT issues. AFTER: The technology company adopted an analytics- driven approach with Splunk to transform its IT operations and business, which dramatically reduced time-to-resolve and number of IT incidents. Real-time visibility now enables engineering teams to share data and expertise, and a new IT operations strategy enables the company to catch issues early to avoid business impacts. MISTAKE #6: OVERWHELMED BY DATA SILOS As infrastructure evolves into a mix of mainframe, client-server, virtualized, serverless and hybrid cloud, the potential for silos and blind spots increases. When Ponemon asked IT professionals about the greatest difficulties of managing IT infrastructure, complexity and diversity of IT systems and technology was highest on the list. Infrastructure complexity affects IT’s ability to quickly determine root cause of an issue. When asked about challenges faced when trying to determine root cause, 63 percent of IT practitioners said that ingesting data from different formats and making sense of it to diagnose and determine root cause is problematic, while 56 percent said they weren’t even sure what data was relevant for specific problems that arise. The Solution To avoid silos and banish blind spots, IT needs a single infrastructure monitoring and troubleshooting solution that can ingest and correlate data from any source. Instead of separate monitoring and log analytics tools, a single solution that unifies and correlates metrics and logs will speed up root cause identification. Let’s take a look at how two companies solved their data silo problems.
  • 10. 19 18 8 BIGGEST MISTAKES IT PRACTITIONERS MAKE 8 BIGGEST MISTAKES IT PRACTITIONERS MAKE The Solution Organizations need to prepare for the worst by putting an IT system failure contingency plan in place. Ownership and responsibilities should be clearly defined, and IT should document a plan for each potential technology failure scenario. It’s vital to continually test a system contingency plan to make sure it works, and keep in mind that any contingency plan will need to be refined as infrastructure changes. It’s imperative to deliver the right information to the right person — or teams — at the right time. MISTAKE #7: NO PLANS FOR SYSTEM FAILURE Most companies aren’t prepared to respond to interruptions or loss of service. According to the Ponemon study, only 29 percent of IT practitioners said their organization has: • Documented workflows and automated processes to follow when a system failure occurs • The ability to pinpoint problems early because of the adoption of automation and current monitoring tool sets The longer it takes to resolve an incident, the longer customers suffer through poor customer experiences and organizations suffer negative business impacts, like loss of revenue. Without documented, ready-to-execute incident management plans, organizations spend precious resolution time responding to potentially recurring issues rather than reflecting and learning.
  • 11. 21 20 8 BIGGEST MISTAKES IT PRACTITIONERS MAKE 8 BIGGEST MISTAKES IT PRACTITIONERS MAKE Forty-six percent said it will improve their ability to deliver projects on schedule, while 45 percent said it will improve their ability to maintain service quality. Moving from from a state of reactive monitoring to proactive, real-time monitoring is achievable with the right tool, as the companies mentioned next learned. SONIFI BEFORE: A technology integrator that services the hospitality and healthcare industries, SONIFI needed a solution for manual and tedious processes that made it difficult to make data- informed decisions. AFTER: Since deploying Splunk Enterprise and taking advantage of new features, including metrics and event annotation, SONIFI has seen an annual savings of $85,000 by centralizing reports and implementing more efficient processes, a $100,000 monthly savings thanks to new insights into its billing decisions, and a reduction in reporting time from days to minutes. ROKT BEFORE: The IT team at online services company ROKT was spending hours manually managing its diversified range of logs, such as user, access, load balancer, CloudTrail, system, customer and transaction logs. AFTER: Splunk has refined log management for the company. As a centralized log analysis tool for machine-generated data as well as unstructured and structured data, it enables IT managers to automatically index, correlate and monitor all logs across virtual and non-virtual environments from a single location, turning manual searches into automated real-time alerts, graphical reports, and intuitive dashboards with only a few mouse clicks. What took the team hours to finish has now become minutes of computer operation, allowing the business to further grow and scale. MISTAKE #8: RELYING ON MANUAL PROCESSES All over the world, IT teams spend too much time on manual tasks such as performing searches, managing daily logs, troubleshooting issues, creating analysis and compliance reports and more. Lack of visibility across the entire infrastructure is forcing IT teams to perform time-consuming manual processes in a reactive state. Only 30 percent of IT practitioners say their organization proactively gathers information from various intelligence sources to understand what the issues are before an outage. In addition to resource allocation challenges, relying on manual processes results in longer mean time to resolution (MTTR), which can negatively affect customer experience and create friction between IT and the business. The Solution So how can IT move from reactive to proactive? Infrastructure monitoring complexity can be reduced with monitoring tools that allow for monitoring and troubleshooting in the cloud or an on-premises environment. When it comes to the feature that IT professionals desire the most in a monitoring solution, it’s no surprise that 87 percent of IT practitioners said they want automated, machine-learning based investigations that enable them to quickly and easily find trends and root causes. Other key features to look for in a monitoring solution are that it can be used across teams, use cases and hybrid environments, and that installation and deployment is easy. In addition to helping IT spend more time making improvements instead of fixing what’s broken, implementing automation and operational analytics will improve the ability to deliver projects within budget, according to 51 percent of IT practitioners.
  • 12. 23 8 BIGGEST MISTAKES IT PRACTITIONERS MAKE 22 8 BIGGEST MISTAKES IT PRACTITIONERS MAKE What should IT really be focused on? • Avoiding outages • Improving customer experience • Providing agility and adapting to ever-changing business needs So how can IT become less reactive and more proactive? Switching from reactive monitoring and troubleshooting to proactive becomes possible with an analytics-driven monitoring solution such as Splunk, which allows for intelligent investigations to speed up root cause analysis. WHAT DOES IT ACTUALLY DO... AND WHAT SHOULD IT ACTUALLY BE DOING? With so many servers, applications and events to monitor, IT professionals are overwhelmed trying to meet performance and availability expectations. They’re also being asked to meet business requirements, to build and deliver everything faster, and to make it higher quality and more efficient across the entire structure. And, they’re supposed to do all that with fewer resources — most on-premises and cloud IT budgets aren’t likely to increase over the next year, according to responses to the Ponemon survey. When you consider that IT is responsible for managing large portfolios comprised of increasingly complex and stacked technologies, answering to business, fulfilling service requests and fixing problems in production when things break, it becomes clear that it’s difficult for IT to meet organizational demands without changing their approach from purely reactive monitoring to proactive — or even predictive — monitoring.
  • 13. 25 25 8 BIGGEST MISTAKES IT PRACTITIONERS MAKE 24 8 BIGGEST MISTAKES IT PRACTITIONERS MAKE How Can Splunk Help Solve Infrastructure Monitoring Pain Points? Our customers have experienced significant improvements in monitoring and troubleshooting with Splunk, including: • Improved detection times • Faster triage and investigation • Service restored more quickly • Faster root cause analysis so they can document trends in incident response and plan accordingly Splunk customers also see cost savings related to infrastructure capacity utilization and are able to find gaps of efficiency instead of just troubleshooting. TRANSFORMING IT: SPEEDING DETECTION, INVESTIGATION AND RESOLUTION WITH PROACTIVE MONITORING At Splunk, we hear from one customer after another that constantly changing demands require a new approach to infrastructure monitoring. From financial services to healthcare, manufacturing, telecommunications, even technology — IT teams in every industry we work with struggle with lack of visibility and insight across the entire infrastructure, tedious investigations and slow mean time to resolution. What Customers Say About Infrastructure Monitoring Challenges Monitoring and Troubleshooting in Silos Increasing Complexity Makes It Harder to Find and Fix Problems Spending Too Much Time Administering Monitoring Software “Why am I monitoring with one tool and troubleshooting with another?” “Applications keep getting more complex and I’m required to monitor more than ever and find problems faster!” “We don’t have enough resources to buy and maintain complex monitoring tools.”
  • 14. 27 26 8 BIGGEST MISTAKES IT PRACTITIONERS MAKE 8 BIGGEST MISTAKES IT PRACTITIONERS MAKE #4 Faster and more comprehensive root cause analysis reduces incident recurrence Root cause analysis Up to 30% unknown root causes, causing incidents to recur Incident troubleshooting Lengthy log analysis done manually Incident triage All hands on deck, taking up 30 to 40 minutes Failure detection Customer often informs IT BEFORE SPLUNK Service restoration Fix is implemented Fix is implemented #1 Better detection customer is notified by IT WITH SPLUNK #2 Faster triage often conducted by 1st level staff without all hands on deck #3 Faster investigation (MTTI) through rapid log search and correlation conducted in conjunction by different teams (everyone looks at the same data) Customer Feedback: • 15–45% reduction in high priority incidents • 70–90% reduction in incident investigation time • 67–82% reduction in business impact • 5–20% increase in infrastructure capacity utilization TOP 4 IT OPS VALUE DRIVERS
  • 15. 29 8 BIGGEST MISTAKES IT PRACTITIONERS MAKE 28 8 BIGGEST MISTAKES IT PRACTITIONERS MAKE “Splunk Insights for Infrastructure cleverly combines metrics and logging for a more complete view of infrastructure performance. We can see unusual behavior such as a CPU spike and correlate it with logs to troubleshoot problems much more quickly.” — Daryl Robbins, Sr. Cloud Architect, Entrust Datacard SPLUNK SOLUTIONS Splunk offers “Insights” products for brand new Splunk users that are designed for a specific use case. Splunk Insights for Infrastructure (SII) is a powerful, easy-to-use server monitoring tool that doesn’t limit the number of users, hosts or alerts provided. SII seamlessly unifies metrics (for monitoring) and logs (for troubleshooting) — from AWS, Linux and Windows environments — all in one user experience. Correlate metrics and logs together across many different out-of-the-box dashboards and visualizations, group things by entity and get to root cause more quickly. It’s easy to download, install and get insights within minutes using prebuilt, lightning-fast dashboards. No more swiveling between different monitoring tools. SII starts out free, then is competitively priced in annual contracts for more retention. For existing Splunk Enterprise customers, the Splunk App for Infrastructure offers the same experience as Splunk Insights for Infrastructure but also has platform capabilities, such as: • Indexing metrics natively, efficiently and at scale • Splunk’s powerful SPL query language (Search and Reporting app) • Role-based access controls • The ability to correlate server metrics and logs with data from all layers of the IT stack
  • 16. 31 30 8 BIGGEST MISTAKES IT PRACTITIONERS MAKE 8 BIGGEST MISTAKES IT PRACTITIONERS MAKE It’s easy to get started with Splunk: Splunk Insights for Infrastructure is available as a free download and includes a 200GB storage license that can monitor approximately 50 servers (depending on your environment and how much per server you monitor) and community support. There’s no time limit on the download, which means you can use the software perpetually — for free! You can buy additional storage that includes basic support from splunk.com or your preferred Splunk reseller partner. Get started today at splunk. com/insights-for-infrastructure. Splunk App for Infrastructure is for existing Splunk customers who already have an Enterprise deployment and license. It’s available for download on Splunkbase. *Reducing Complexity in IT infrastructure Monitoring: A Study of Global Organizations. Ponemon Institute, LLC. Publication date: April 2018 CONCLUSION From lack of visibility during cloud migration to reliance on manual processes, organizations face an uphill battle when it comes to troubleshooting and monitoring hybrid environments. It’s clear that IT needs a solution that will enable them to effectively manage increasingly complex, environments — one that will take it from reactive to proactive IT and eventually, predictive IT. Splunk addresses many of the IT challenges you face by providing: • Correlated metrics and logs for improved monitoring and faster troubleshooting • Seamless metric- and log-based monitoring and troubleshooting • Automated investigations to find trends and root causes easier
  • 17. © 2018 Splunk Inc. All rights reserved. Splunk, Splunk>, Listen to Your Data, The Engine for Machine Data,Splunk Cloud, Splunk Light and SPL are trademarks and registered trademarks of Splunk Inc. in the United States and other countries. EB-Splunk-8-Biggest-Mistakes-IT-Practitioners-Make-101 GET STARTED. www.splunk.com/insights-for-infrastructure