TAKING IT

TO THE NEXT
LEVEL
CONTENTS

1. AVOIDING IT FIRE DRILLS 4

2. BETTER DEVOPS 8

3. CONTAINER MONITORING 11

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Every organization is experiencing the effects of
digitization. It’s not only changing the technology
we use, it’s changing the way teams connect,
work and solve problems. To support digital
transformation, IT has the opportunity to invest in
new priorities, initiatives and technologies. Discover
how IT can position itself as a strategic business
partner, adopt a data-centric DevOps approach,
and successfully experiment with new stack
technologies like containers.

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FIGHTING FIRE WITH DATA
HOW TO AVOID IT FIRE
DRILLS AND BECOME
MORE PROACTIVE
IT’s traditional role as an infrastructure provider is being
challenged by cloud service providers, tight budgets and the
technology needs of new digital business strategies. And these
challenges aren’t going away—the demand for new and efficient
IT services are increasing as businesses adopt mobile devices
and cloud services.

This demand also comes with little room for error. The business
needs these new IT services quickly and reliably. Any delay
or fire drill can cause the business to lose its competitive
advantage and even revenue. IT has got to learn to be more
strategic, and yet, it is stuck in the legacy way of operating.

The New Normal: IT as Business Partner

In this new era of service delivery, IT must evolve into a proactive
partner for business initiatives. It’s a change that demands
IT increase operational efficiency and free up resources for
strategic, revenue-generating, customer-focused initiatives.
And this transformation must happen fast: a recent Gartner CIO
survey that CIOs are working to understand business priorities
to inform and execute their digital transformation. CIOs are
shifting their investment pattern in response to digital business,
with investments predicted to increase up to 44 percent by 2018
to support the business goals of digital ecosystem.

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While not an easy shift, it’s a valuable one. It’s an opportunity to
improve IT’s reputation and align with business priorities. This
requires IT to act as a business accelerator, by enabling new
applications and business insights derived from information
management and analysis.

How Does IT Achieve This Shift?

The key to transforming the way IT operates is to leverage
the immense amount of ever-growing data from across its
infrastructure to make fact-based decisions from both a service
and business perspective. Without data-driven insights, it’s
difficult to accurately measure service performance.

Additionally, IT must look at its services holistically, whether

virtual servers and networks or security and user support, to
deliver a successful business service. This holistic view enables all
consumers of the information, including IT and the business, to see
overall performance in terms of services provided and end-user
experience. The result? IT can anticipate problems before they
become crises. It also moves from being reactive to proactive, and
provides the service intelligence business users need.

What Is Service Intelligence?

A holistic, proactive approach to IT requires service intelligence,
which is defined by three primary features:

1. Measures and reports on indicators relevant to the business

2. Unlocks operational efficiencies by collecting and correlating

data across IT silos

3. Uses data analytics to provide business insights and drive

decisions

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Here is another way of looking at the three elements of service
intelligence.

WHAT IS SERVICE INTELLIGENCE?

Enabling a business-aware IT
Measuring and reporting on indicators that matter

Unlocking operational efficiencies

Collaborating across silos to improve service
operations

Data-driven decision making

Solving problems and anticipating pitfalls with
sophisticated analytics and powerful insights

Given the complexity of the data generated by IT infrastructure,

delivering service intelligence requires sophisticated software
that can:

• Automatically collect data from any system and application

• Incorporate a data filtering and statistical engine to provide

predictive analytics and facilitate problem-solving and
troubleshooting

• Enable anyone, both business users and IT, to produce

visualizations and dashboards

• Be easily customized by non-programmers to enable service-

specific dashboard that measure relevant KPIs

• Provide the ability to drill into data from visualization to see

context and details

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Now’s the Time to Shift
IT is at a crossroads as new digital services, data-driven insights
and decisions, and competitive agility require a fundamental
reshaping of its role. IT must change from a traditional focus
on infrastructure operations and reactive fire drills to proactive
service management and intelligence.

An essential part of this evolution is for IT personnel to work on

value-generating activities through the use of new data-driven
software. Proactive IT requires tools that provide end-to-end
service intelligence and reporting, automated data collection
and analysis across IT silos with customizable visualizations and
dashboards that use data and machine learning to
drive intelligence.

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THE KEY TO BETTER
DEVOPS IS IN YOUR DATA
DevOps is a buzzword right now for good reason—it can deliver
significant benefits. The 2017 State of DevOps Report, which
surveyed 3,200 IT professionals around the world, paints a
picture of high-performing IT development organizations: those
with multiple code deployments per day and less than one-hour
lead time between code fixes and production deployment.

These organizations also deploy software 46 times more often

than their counterparts. Their change failure rate is less than 15
percent and they spend 22 percent less time on unplanned work.
The end result? Up to 21 percent less rework, which can save
even small organizations millions of dollars. But DevOps can’t
achieve its potential unless there’s a tight feedback loop across
all phases of application delivery.

Create a Virtuous Circle With Data

When your organization implements a continuous integration
and continuous delivery (CI/CD) process, your DevOps
teams must glue together a complex tool chain—one that
spans requirements gathering, code management, module
integration, and unit and integration testing and delivery. But
all too often, these tools are used in isolation and with little
measurement of their effectiveness. This ends up creating silos
of disjointed information.

As the adage goes, you can’t manage what you don’t measure.
You only can get the full benefit of DevOps by incorporating
feedback across the different stages of the build pipeline that is
based on actual data, not anecdotes, ad hoc efforts or gut feel.

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Without measuring and consolidating your DevOps process
data, it’s impossible to track progress throughout the CI/CD
pipeline. Your team won’t be able to flag errors or report the
status of defect fixes and quantify developer activity. And by
giving your developers, IT operations and managers access
to test data, you can tighten the feedback loop between
production and deployment. You also can identify the
effectiveness of test coverage and measure the quality and
productivity of individual developers.

When you consolidate build pipeline and other data into a

single platform, you gain end-to-end visibility into the activity
and progress across the DevOps tool chain. Your developers
have access to information that can help them make decisions
that benefit the business through faster deployments, better
software quality, improved security and less rework.

How FamilySearch Achieves 900 Deployments a Day

FamilySearch, a nonprofit family history organization with the
world’s largest collection of genealogy records, uses DevOps for
its CI/CD processes to deploy on Amazon Web Service (AWS).
But it wanted to better track changes across its websites, so it
turned to Splunk Cloud to aggregate data from across its
IT environment.

FamilySearch now ingests, processes, analyzes and makes sense

of up to 4TB per day of log information using Splunk Cloud.
Application delivery teams built dashboards that use this data
to monitor site health and the full CI/CD process. The result:
FamilySearch can do 900 deployments per day with less than
20 minutes between code check-in and production release.

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The Key to DevOps Success
Whether it’s a DevOps tool chain or business process, the key to
improvement is the ability to record, collect and analyze data.
Your developers can use a DevOps feedback loop to improve
software quality, developer efficiency and release cycle time.
Given the many different systems and the huge volumes of data
generated across the DevOps build pipeline, eliminating the
silos and blind spots in your data collection and analysis is key.
To quantify DevOps, you need an effective way to ingest data
from any system and format, handle large data flows in real
time and provide the sophisticated data search and analysis,
so your teams can easily summarize results, flag anomalies and
streamline forensic analysis.

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GOT CONTAINERS?
YOU’LL NEED A WAY TO
MONITOR THEM
The use of containers is growing rapidly. In a June 2016 survey
conducted by Cloud Foundry and ClearPath Strategies, 64
percent of respondents said they plan to mainstream the use of
containers in the next year. As the use of containers proliferates,
it is essential to address monitoring to improve the performance,
usage and troubleshooting of containers. However, effective
monitoring requires an analytics-driven approach that not only
informs developers and operations of what’s happening, but
also offers those teams the ability to dig into their container
usage and performance data to gain actionable insight.

What Happens When Something Goes Wrong?

When there is a problem, it is critical to quickly gain visibility
into the specific details of the event. Errors in the applications
running in containers are the most common source of
container problems, but they are not the only one. Container
issues may result from a problem with the underlying
infrastructure, such as the operating system, storage, network,
database or other component.

Therefore, container-monitoring solutions must have visibility

and analytical capabilities that help users identify the source of
the problem. Failure to do this quickly and accurately may result
in longer downtime, which can lead to substantial cost and risk
for the organization.

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Key Capabilities of an Effective Container-
Monitoring Solution
Containers have unique characteristics that will impact what
monitoring solutions an organization should choose. Among
these characteristics is the fact that containers are ephemeral
and can be started and stopped in a matter of seconds. This
requires a monitoring solution that can leverage logging and
metrics interfaces, as well as retain information about that
container after it is no longer running. Further, the container-
monitoring solution must have not only the ability to analyze
more than just the container, but also provide insight into the
availability, performance and usage of other components of the
application stack.

Perhaps the most important requirement for effective and

efficient container monitoring is to have a solution that is
native to the container. The logging driver is the source
of critical information about the container that can be
implemented by simply configuring how containers are
defined or run. Using an embedded solution allows for better
performance, as the monitoring tool is not competing for
resources with other processes.

The final component of an effective solution is an analytics-

based approach, which makes it easier to evaluate and act
on the information surfaced by the monitoring solution. The
dashboard often will be the starting point for remediating
problems that occur in containers. Additionally, the dashboard
must support the ability to dive deeply into the logs and
metrics in order to gain the detailed information necessary for
effective remediation.

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A Path Toward Better Container Monitoring
Splunk Enterprise or Splunk Cloud provide the starting point for
container monitoring. Machine data is easily communicated from
your containers to your Splunk software by using the Splunk
Logging Driver for Docker. With this driver, you can retrieve the
Docker container information from the containers and monitor
logs seamlessly. This is a simple task, as the Docker Driver for
Splunk is built into Docker.

For optimal container monitoring, it is critical to analyze all

data sources from the container, which include container/
microservice logs, container metrics/events, container clusters,
nodes and applications, application logs and wire data. Using
the above Splunk products, you can correlate container data
with data from other tiers, which will deliver a full picture of
the environment.

The result is a comprehensive solution for container monitoring

that provides ease of deployment and rapid time to value, and
can be correlated with other data sources you’re using Splunk
software for—providing you with an end-to-end perspective.

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