Why do you need Splunk? Application Performance Analytics

Why is the mobile application out of order? Can we identify problems with applications before end users encounter this? Is the latest version of the app better or worse than the previous ones? In this article we will explain how Splunk can help you in finding answers to these questions.

With this article, we begin a series of articles about what tasks you can use Splunk for. All solutions can be divided into 5 directions. Today we begin to understand in more detail with application analytics.


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Currently, business relies on applications to handle almost every process. A low level of satisfaction with the performance of these applications can jeopardize reputation, competitive advantage, and ultimately revenue. Therefore, getting inside out of the applications and infrastructure on which they work becomes an important task for any business.

Splunk allows you to aggregate machine data about application usage, availability and performance. Data can be collected from a wide range of sources in real time.




Let's take a closer look at what value we can get from monitoring application performance .

Advanced Application Monitoring and Alerting

Measuring real-time application availability, performance, and user usage contributes to the ability to provide high quality service and gain positive customer experience. When you combine the visibility of machine data at different levels of your infrastructure with real-time monitoring, you can anticipate events even before they happen.

Troubleshooting

Reducing the average time to system recovery ( MTTR ) and troubleshooting, identifying the causes of failures and system bottlenecks. Distributed applications can generate a lot of errors, and the root of the problem is not easy to find, because application developers and administrators may not have direct access to the machine data they need. Splunk can provide access to all your data, allowing you to quickly fix problems and reduce downtime.

Capacity planning

Optimize application performance and maintenance costs by understanding application usage. As well as forecasting future values ​​and power planning, due to machine learning

Service Level Management (SLA)

Analysis and reporting on the overall availability of services and key performance indicators (KPI), as well as the ability to quickly determine the cause, in case of deviations from the optimal values.

Business analytics

The ability to integrate not only IT data into Splunk, but also data from non-IT sources, allows developers and various business areas to assess the impact of transactions on the business and how applications contribute to the business.

Devops

For IT professionals using DevOps, Splunk software helps improve the speed and quality of work on applications. Unlike other solutions focused on individual components of development, Splunk provides real-time information at all stages of the product development life cycle, which reduces the time it takes to develop and launch a product to market. DevOps Video

Success story

Let's take a look at how Zillow, a real estate sales and rental company, uses Splunk to ensure the smooth operation of its website.



Zillow website traffic is generated by clients from mobile devices, PCs and tablets. Previously, when occasional website crashes occurred, Zillow executives were concerned about customer satisfaction, risking millions of dollars in advertising revenue or inability to enter into contractual agreements with companies that provide real estate data for Zillow.

“If the website“ fell ”at 2 am, I would have to scrutinize terabytes of magazines to find out what was wrong,” said Jerome Ibanes, data architect at Zillow.

It was impossible to continue using outdated tools: Zillow needed effective solutions for processing and analyzing constantly changing unstructured data. Zillow previously had to move terabytes of data across several tools to use machine learning and gain insight into what was happening.

Zillow initially deployed Splunk Enterprise to troubleshoot IT infrastructure. And already success in error handling has led to additional tasks: from predicting website traffic and monitoring the application testing environment to obtaining information about site visits by clients and their actions on the site to provide the best content.

A video in which Jerome Ibanes tells about the experience of implementing Splunk in Zillow can be viewed here .

Problems that required a solution

• Website disruptions affected customer attitudes
• Website disruptions affected advertising revenue and compromised contractual agreements with companies that provide data for Zillow.
• It took hours to identify the reason.
• Product developers waited one to two days to access data.

Data sources

• Web servers
• Java servers
• Python applications
• Database
• Firewalls
• Load balancers
• Mobile devices

Impact on business

• Improving customer service
• Millions of dollars in lost profits reduced by reducing website failures
• Reducing the time to identify the cause of the incident from hours to several minutes or seconds
• Accelerating time to market, providing product developers with real-time application performance data

Thus, analytics of applications in Splunk allows:

1. Improve application performance by identifying issues that affect accessibility and speed
2. Reduce average time to system recovery and troubleshooting
3. Obtain application usage information , including user behavior and application performance
4. Improve DevOps and reduce time to market

If you have not tried Splunk yet, then it's time to start, the free version up to 500MB per day is available to everyone. And if you have questions or problems with Splunk - you can ask them to us , and we will help.

We are the official Premier Splunk Partner .