Empower Engineers with

Unified Observability
Conquer cloud complexity and prevent unplanned downtime.
Today’s multi- and hybrid-cloud world is exceptionally complex, leaving
engineering teams with more operational responsibility than ever before. In
Splunk’s State of Observability 2023, 81% of observability professionals say
the number of tools and capabilities they use has been increasing, with 32%
saying the increase is significant. This complexity leaves engineers with an
unprecedented amount of data, potential outcomes and threats — plus dark
corners of their organizations that can be nearly impossible to find without
the proper tools.
Think of your organization like a city, and your engineers as the protectors
keeping a watchful eye. The more your city grows in population and in
structural size, the more constant attention it needs across all of its
neighborhoods. As this happens, it becomes increasingly difficult for your
small-but-mighty team to monitor every incident that could affect the city’s
people and operations. And any disturbance that slips through the cracks
only becomes more complicated, resulting in costly and time-consuming
efforts to clean up the mess.

Empower Engineers with Unified Observability | Splunk

With so much to watch out for every day in the buzzy, ever-evolving city Observability leads to
that is your organization, how do you empower your engineers to do
their jobs better, while also saving them the headaches that come with
resilience, and digitally
unidentified issues? The answer is unified observability. Unified observability resilient organizations
empowers your engineering team to achieve foundational visibility and
save $48 million per
streamlined workflows, while also prioritizing and proactively responding to
critical issues. year on downtime costs,
It’s highly possible that your engineering team is limited in its capacity as according to Splunk’s Digital
it becomes more overworked and overburdened with alerts. But unified
observability can provide that extra superpower team members need as
Resilience Pays Off report.
they navigate uncharted territory. By nature, organizations that embed
observability into their processes are future-proofed, more efficient and
most of all — more digitally resilient.

Empower Engineers with Unified Observability | Splunk

Technology is a shapeshifter.
We live in a world where the technology landscape is ever changing. Often,
dealing with this complexity is much like encountering a shapeshifting
supervillain in our fictional city. Modern environments are both complex
and ephemeral as teams are managing containers, serverless functions and
Kubernetes infrastructure. As a result, telemetry data volumes are exploding.
It’s a tall order for engineers to keep up with all of this data, and many
monitoring tools only scratch the surface.
Attack surfaces are also expanding, making it even more difficult to secure
and protect all operations. Organizations continue to move from on-premises
to the cloud, and software systems are moving away from the traditional
monolithic approach as microservices gain popularity. This increases the
number of services, API calls and dependencies significantly.
In addition, web experiences are now more fluid and dynamic, with single-
page and native mobile apps. With single-page apps serving dynamic content,
users don’t have to click from page to page anymore. Instead, they navigate
dozens of apps to enjoy streaming, sports, shopping and more from iPhones
and Androids — resulting in more reliance on web browsers and APIs than
ever before.
According to 451 Research, 79% of
organizations using observability are
actively working to reduce the number of
vendors from which they purchase tools.
Empower Engineers with Unified Observability | Splunk
Key challenges IDC reports that
In order to succeed in the multi- and hybrid-cloud world, organizations must 90% of organizations
solve the fundamental challenge of complexity itself. Lack of visibility across have modernized at least half their
complex infrastructure and services leads to longer MTTD and MTTR, while legacy apps.
duplicate and irrelevant alerts make it hard to triage and respond to incidents.
Here are the top challenges engineering leaders typically see, and the core
reasons why a renewed approach is essential: O’Reilly found that
• Larger surface area to identify problems: Across clouds, Kubernetes, 77% of companies
serverless computing and APIs, there’s far more to monitor and react to. No already use microservices.
engineer has context for the entire system, and therefore they rely on other
teams for full context.
• Limitations with existing services: Infrastructure and apps can impact Gartner says by 2025,
business performance, with the potential to miss issues due to partial data.
95% of new
• Increased app complexity: There has been a surge of dependencies across
teams, services and layers in cloud-native environments. As a result, cross-
digital workloads
will be deployed on
functional teams work independently to release faster code.
cloud-native platforms.
• Siloed work: Each team uses different monitoring tools or dashboards,
and the lack of centralized controls leads to increased spending and puts
sensitive data at risk.
• Lack of flexibility: Teams may use different tools that rely on proprietary
agents for data collection. This often means they are locked in based on how
they instrumented data collection, limiting their ability to evolve over time as
business needs change.
• Disjointed workflows and tooling: Oftentimes, tools and services are
not designed to talk to one another, limiting the ability to correlate across
different data sources and gain full context. Different monitoring tools or
dashboards can create more operational complexity, and gaps in visibility
can lead to long, costly MTTRs.
4
Unified observability: the light in the dark
Our hectic fictional city is made up of dozens of neighborhoods, each • Ability to get ahead of issues and respond proactively.
one with its own concerns, problems and unique characteristics. It’s This means they can prevent outages and debug problems
nearly impossible for a small team of protectors to keep an eye on in microservices before critical impact to customers and
all of those dark corners, but the right combination of superpowers the business.
can make a huge positive impact. Similarly, your organization is • Unified workflows that enable them to collaborate seamlessly.
multifaceted and complex, and requires the correct set of powerful Teams are able to standardize best practices across the
tools in order to get ahead of potential problems. organization, making it possible to find and fix issues originating
Imagine how much easier it would be if you had a centralized anywhere in their stack with shared data and context. This enables
surveillance hub that would monitor and collect information on them to improve developer productivity and efficiently scale to
incidents from every corner of the city — in many cases, even before meet new business needs.
they happen. While this may seem like a farfetched possibility that Ultimately, unified observability gives your organization an extra
only superheroes can achieve, this extraordinary level of vigilance efficiency boost that results in time, money and resource savings. On
can exist within your organization with unified observability. top of that, MTTD and MTTR are accelerated. Many organizations are
As we mentioned earlier, unified observability results in an already experiencing these benefits.
abundance of benefits for engineers, including:
• Foundational visibility that enables them to see across hybrid
environments. Engineers can consolidate visibility for hybrid- and
multi-cloud workloads and troubleshoot mission-critical apps with
logs, metrics and traces in one unified experience.
• Ability to prioritize actions by understanding risk and
performance impacts. With unified observability, engineers
can align infrastructure and service performance with business
performance to understand the impact of changes. They can also
reduce alert noise to prioritize the problems that matter.

Empower Engineers with Unified Observability | Splunk

Real-world examples
of unified observability
in action
Now that we’ve established that unified observability is the key to
solving the core challenges that engineers face when it comes to
navigating our digital world, let’s explore what it looks like in practice.
Read on to discover how organizations like Lenovo, Stripe and Rappi
rely on Splunk’s Unified Security and Observability Platform to keep
their organizations safe and secure.

Empower Engineers with Unified Observability | Splunk 6

 ~5 min MTTR,
Lenovo offers frictionless e-commerce compared to about
30 minutes previously

experience with Splunk Observability.

Key challenges
At Lenovo, operating an e-commerce site often means getting
unexpected web traffic and data usage spikes, so performance,
stability and flexibility are top priorities, especially when cloud
migration is also underway.
Key results
With Splunk Observability Cloud, Lenovo cut troubleshooting
time in half, reduced total cost of ownership and maintained
100% uptime despite a 300% increase in web traffic. With Splunk
Observability Cloud, the Lenovo team uses full-fidelity data and
predictive analytics to monitor infrastructure performance at cloud
scale. “What’s most lovely about Splunk is we benefit hugely from
100% uptime
despite 300% increase
having centralized, customizable analytics dashboards that collate
in online traffic
and analyze transactions in real time, ensuring that we respond to
customers in a timely manner while spotting errors and latency at a
glance,” says director of operations for the online and eCommerce
platform at Lenovo.
Highly scalable
As a result, the average time it takes to recover from a system for future traffic growth
failure has now gone from 30 minutes to about five minutes. Faster
troubleshooting means increased productivity for developers and
lower revenue loss for the organization.

What’s most lovely about Splunk is we benefit hugely from

having centralized, customizable analytics dashboards
that collate and analyze transactions in real time, ensuring
that we respond to customers in a timely manner while
spotting errors and latency at a glance.
Director of operations, online and eCommerce platform, Lenovo

Empower Engineers with Unified Observability | Splunk 7

Rappi fixes issues 90% faster
while handling a 300% surge
in on-demand orders.
Key challenges
To keep up with skyrocketing demand for its delivery services during the pandemic, Rappi
needed scalable, powerful observability tools to ensure customers could place and receive
orders quickly and reliably. These observability tools needed to grow at the same rapid
pace that Rappi was growing.
Key results
With the Splunk platform, Rappi meets high shopper expectations for smooth ordering via
mobile apps and websites, enabling fast delivery of local goods and services to doorsteps
in nine countries. Rappi turned to Splunk Observability Cloud for a more robust approach 90%+ faster MTTR
to infrastructure monitoring and troubleshooting, application performance monitoring, real
A single dashboard provides data for with Splunk’s observability products
user monitoring and synthetic monitoring. engineering, DevOps, site reliability
“The more complex our architecture became, the harder it was for us to detect problems,”
says Alejandro Comisario, executive vice president of engineering at Rappi. But by
engineering, SecOps, peer engineering
300% growth
switching to Splunk Observability Cloud, Rappi has end-to-end visibility into its distributed and microservices, operations and managed with real-time
microservices-based architecture, which includes Amazon Elastic Container Service and
Kubernetes clusters. business metrics. If something monitoring during
the pandemic
With a more agile approach and real-time observability from Splunk, the Rappi IT team now happens at Rappi, and we don’t see it
efficiently manages more than 1,000 microservices, 6,000 hosts and 15,000 containers —
all while slashing mean time to resolution (MTTR) by over 90%. on our Splunk dashboard, it’s actually
not happening at all. 8.8 million
monthly orders
seamlessly processed
Alejandro Comisario, Executive Vice President of Engineering, Rappi

Empower Engineers with Unified Observability | Splunk 8

Stripe achieves 99.9998% The Splunk platform is critical to our 500 billion
uptime during Cyber Week.
API calls
infrastructure strategy, delivering
ease of use, massive scale and fast
Key challenges decision-making. We need all three 99.9998% availability
during peak times
Stripe has a bold mission to increase the GDP of the internet by making it easy for to power our business.
ambitious companies everywhere to grow their business. In 2021, 2400 new businesses
and 100 nonprofits started on Stripe every day. With all of those data points, Stripe Rahul Patil, Head of Infrastructure, Stripe
handles about 500 billion API calls per year. With so much at stake for the businesses it 13 seconds
supports and the online economy as a whole, Stripe can’t afford downtime or lapses in of downtime
security — it takes a lifetime to gain a user’s trust, and you can lose it overnight. in a whole month
Key results of processing

Stripe achieves 99.9998% availability during Cyber Week, even during peak times like
Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Stripe maintains server uptime and availability with only
13 seconds of downtime in a whole month of processing. The company uses hundreds
of millions of data points per day, and that’s why Stripe relies on Splunk’s security and
observability platform to keep systems resilient and reliable around the clock. Stripe
runs its mission-critical infrastructure globally to ensure that billions of daily payment
processing transactions run smoothly.

Empower Engineers with Unified Observability | Splunk 9

The unified observability
platform you need
Organizations with Splunk As you can see, many of the world’s largest organizations rely on Splunk to help
Observability report a 70% keep their digital systems secure and reliable. With Splunk’s Unified Security and
decrease in system outages, Observability Platform, organizations are overcoming the complexities, threats and
75% decrease in MTTR, 250 disruptions that come between them and their missions. Splunk helps organizations
achieve foundational visibility, align business and IT and service performance, get
hours more uptime and 243%
ahead of major issues and unify workflows so that teams can collaborate seamlessly.
ROI, according to Forrester’s
Total Economic Impact report. With Splunk, the bustling city that is your organization has never been under such
watchful eyes — and your heroic engineers have never worked more efficiently.
Splunk’s Unified Security and Observability Platform gives engineering teams
(as well as security and ITOps) comprehensive visibility across the hybrid and
edge technology landscape. In addition, they’re equipped with powerful tools for
investigation and response at scale, enabling them to accelerate growth.

Empower Engineers with Unified Observability | Splunk 10

Ready to learn more? Check out Splunk’s Observability
Buyer’s Guide to learn how ITOps and engineering
teams can lower the cost of unplanned downtime by
improving observability.

Get started

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