Data visibility: the key to streamline operations and go future proof
By Splunk
Splunk empowers organisations to overcome operational inefficiencies and stay agile, says Splunk’s APAC Vice President for Observability, Dhiraj Goklani.
Splunk's observability platform enables organisations to unify silos of data to achieve greater customer satisfaction and better business outcomes. Image: Canva.
Digital wallet DANA is responsible for processing the payments of over 150 million users in Indonesia. However, the fragmented monitoring system behind the platform, was not geared to deliver services at such a large scale.
When a problem arose, the old systems delayed incident response four to five times longer than its target within 30 minutes.
Splunk helped DANA to pool data on a single platform that leads to a faster incident response and recovery timeframe.
With increasing demands from customers to deliver services at a faster pace, organisations are pressed to identify potential issues before they arise to design solutions and prepare for the future.
Since organisations cannot fix what they cannot see, they require visible data to identify and resolve issues.
Yet, many organisations operate with fragmented monitoring tools that complicate observability of data over time, what Splunk’s APAC Vice President for Observability, Dhiraj Goklani, calls “technical debt”.
In an interview with GovInsider, Goklani shares how Splunk empowers customers across markets to make informed decisions toward improving their service delivery and customer experience.
Breaking down silos to unleash productivity
He notes that data silos can limit cross-teams collaboration leading to inefficiencies and reduced agility to respond to internal issues.
Splunk dashboards helps to visualise data so that organisations can identify and resolve issues quickly, freeing up time to develop new features.
The company’s observability platform allows organisations to unify all silos of data into a centralised pane to enhance problem-solving efficiency, adds Goklani.
Before DANA adopted Splunk, their old system couldn't link back-end and front-end data, creating visibility gaps when transaction volume grew, says Goklani. This became a problem during Covid-19, when the Indonesian government used the app for subsidy distribution.
Splunk Observability Cloud allows DANA to better visualise both front-end and back-end data in real-time. This helps them to proactively manage potential issues and increase productivity.
“What DANA did well is they (opted) for a people and process perspective... let’s break down these silos and make it a more DevOps-centric culture, so it is much more collaborative”, says Goklani.
Customers who have done A/B testing to compare their overall efficiency in releasing code have found that those using Splunk are eight to 10 times faster thanks to the observability platform, Goklani says.
Similarly, Unitel, a Mongolian telecommunication company, was able to halve incidence response time by adopting a single unified data analytics platform with Splunk, he adds.
Staying ahead of a crisis
Unifying silos of data on a platform enhances digital resilience necessary for staying ahead of impacts or incidents, Goklani says. This enables agencies to detect, prevent, and respond to events that could disrupt business processes.
Goklani notes that one such company that understands and invests in their digital resilience is Singapore Airlines (SIA). The airline sought to be well ahead of any end-user impact.
SIA requires continuous high-level service from the booking stage to the overall in-flight experience. Hence, it tapped on its mobile app and enhanced self-kiosks machines at the airport to ease the check-in and information finding processes for customers, he notes.
To ensure that SIA’s customers can search, monitor, and modify their travel plans on reliable systems, Splunk acted as the Operational Data Analytics (ODA) platform, resulting in over 75 per cent faster issue detection.
Goklani notes that the time-series data allows SIA to create patterns of what potential issues could occur in every stage of the available services. The predictive algorithms helped SIA to prepare for and recover from any anomalies before these reach the user.
Easing tech for non-technical users
Splunk has been investing in increasing user friendliness, aiming to remain the top choice for organisations to improve efficiency, incident response and availability, says Goklani.
Splunk launched AI (Artificial Intelligence) Assistants that allows non-technical users to use natural language to tell the system what the user is looking for.
“The system automatically generates the search for Splunk and the dashboards and does all the heavy lifting for the user,” Goklani explains.
This helps to ease the skills gap that organisations are facing. New users can learn new operations with the AI assistant and keep pace with the company’s needs.
With these strategies, even non-technical business leaders can tap on Splunk’s observability platforms to improve overall service quality, he says.
Additionally, teams are freed from routine, mundane work and can use that time to focus on high-level tasks like threat hunting and analysis.
The ability to search, analyse and visualise all the data provides organisations with insights that allow them to achieve greater customer satisfaction and better business outcomes.