Edmodo, the largest social learning network with over 28 million users, utilizes Splunk for AWS to manage their extensive cloud infrastructure as their user base and AWS usage have rapidly increased. The company customizes Splunk to utilize tags for cost differentiation rather than the default billing subaccounts approach, enabling teams to derive insights and take action on real-time resource usage. Edmodo's personalized dashboards allow for detailed evaluation of services managed by their teams through tailored usage data views.

1. How Edmodo Uses Splunk App for AWS
Jack Murgia
NetOps Architect
jack@edmodo.com

2. Edmodo is the largest social learning network
in the world
28,000,000+
TOTAL USERS AROUND THE WORLD

3. The Edmodo user base has grown REALLY
FAST and so has our AWS usage.
• New Features
20M+ users
18,000,000
▸ Require new backend clusters
• More Employees
14,000,000
▸ Launch more development
servers
20M+ Registered Users
• New Investors
▸ Want assurances we spend
money wisely
10,000,000
Investors
6,000,000
4.8M users
1.1M users
2,000,000
225K users
Dec 09
Dec 10
Dec 11
Dec 12

4. 100’s of
production, development, reporting
and operations instances are
managed on Amazon Web
Services Elastic Compute Cloud.
20 employees across 5 teams can
launch EC2 instances.

5. We tried lots of slow, pricey, hosted apps.
None had what we REALLY Needed …

6. Real Time RI vs On-Demand Usage
Do we have enough RI coverage? Are our RIs being used?

7. Getting Usage Data In front of Teams
Making Real Time Usage Data Visible Encourages Action
Problem:
The default Splunk for AWS App configuration is
based on billing “subaccounts”, which Edmodo
does not use.
Edmodo uses tags to differentiate between cost
centers.

8. Use These Tags: Product, Service, Space
Configurable Metadata Available for All AWS Resources
• Product
▸ designation is derived from the
end user perspective. Where
component resources serve
overlapping Products, the
Product designation is that which
uses/requires a resource most or
the resource's reason for existing.
• Service is the primary function of
the resource. Examples are
▸ mysql
▸ apache
▸ active-directory
• Space a logical workplace
designation. Examples are:
▸ Development
▸ Production

9. Edit the Splunk For AWS Scripts for Tags
get_instances.py and get_ops.py

10. Create Lookup Tables For The Tags
Simple .csv files are referenced by dashboard view files

11. Personalize Your Dashboard Views
The Dashboard XML format is easy to customize

12. Drill Down Into Usage Data by Tags
Teams Can Now Evaluate Usage For The Services They Manage

13. Drill Down Into Usage Data by Tags
Teams Can Now Evaluate Usage For The Services They Manage

14. Drill Down Into Usage Data by Tags
Teams Can Now Evaluate Usage For The Services They Manage

15. Download Tag Customizations
http://public.edim.com.s3.amazonaws.com/splunk-aws-app-for-tags.tgz