As modern IT environments continue to grow in complexity and speed, the ability to efficiently manage and optimize diverse systems has become a business requirement. Splunk IT Service Intelligence (ITSI) is an AIOps, analytics, and IT management solution that provides visibility to optimize IT performance and help predict incidents before they impact customers. This blog post provides a guide for adopting, implementing, and maximizing the potential of Splunk ITSI.
Getting Started with ITSI
With a highly extensible solution like ITSI, it can be challenging to determine the efforts that bring the fastest and most effective time to value. To help you navigate this process, here are some tips and best practices to help make the most of your deployment:
- Explore the Getting Started Guide: If you are in the initial stages of implementing ITSI, our getting started guide provides a comprehensive overview of the initial steps.
- Adopt ITSI Capabilities Strategically: Prioritize which capabilities to implement based on your organizational needs by reviewing ITSI’s strategic adoption guide.
- Optimize Operations for End-User Experience: To ensure the best operational outcomes and end-user experiences, refer to our definitive guide to best practices.
- Gain Visibility into Third-Party APM Solutions: Utilize our APM solution content pack to enhance visibility for ITOps, Executives, DevOps, and DevSecOps.
Curious about recently released features that make getting started easier?
Check out a new and easy to use feature called Service Sandbox (GA) inside ITSI’s 4.19 release. With drag and drop abilities now in the UI, users can map and simulate services, service health scores, and identify potential errors before production for even faster service decomposition.
How to Address Key IT Challenges
Today's IT environments are complex and dynamic, presenting numerous challenges that require flexible solutions. Splunk ITSI is designed to address these challenges head-on, providing visibility, intelligent correlation and predictive analytics to deliver smooth and efficient operations. Below, we highlight three critical challenges and reference technical guidance on ways that ITSI helps:
- Overwhelming Alert Noise: One of the most significant challenges in modern IT operations is the lack of visibility into the health, dependencies, performance, and impact of IT assets. When teams can’t make sense of their environment, they can’t find and fix issues and spend their time jumping between tools. This becomes even more challenging when the accumulation of tools, siloed teams, and data create an overflow of alerts (many of which are duplicate), and makes it extremely difficult to understand signals in the noise. This results in frustrated teams, lost revenue, and higher costs.
- Recommendations: Start reducing alert noise by understanding Splunk’s approach to Event Analytics. From there, see how to process notable events so they can be grouped into meaningful Splunk ITSI episodes. Want more help identifying the alerts or groups of alerts that appear to be unusual compared to what you normally see? Read about approaches you can use to help identify the “unknown unknown” in your alert storms.
- Recommendations: Start reducing alert noise by understanding Splunk’s approach to Event Analytics. From there, see how to process notable events so they can be grouped into meaningful Splunk ITSI episodes. Want more help identifying the alerts or groups of alerts that appear to be unusual compared to what you normally see? Read about approaches you can use to help identify the “unknown unknown” in your alert storms.
- Lack of Visibility and Business Context: Connecting the visibility of IT and business stakeholders is crucial in order to align them on the same objectives. Without a centralized location to see all the data, teams spend time trying to surface relationships between applications and infrastructure, how these relationships affect services, and how all of this impacts the business. Piecing the alignment together in complex and dynamic environments makes it challenging for teams to understand the severity of incidents and prioritize issues based on their business impact.
- Recommendations: See how to analyze IT service health with advanced tools and dashboards that provide detailed insights into the health and performance of your IT services. Review how executive glass tables offer high-level visibility into critical services, and help to modernize IT operations by aligning them with business goals. Understand how the dashboards provide a clear visual of how IT and engineering impacts business functions, and foster faster identification and prioritization of incidents that impact the bottom line. You can check out more glass table examples here. As a next step, take a look at step-by-step guidance on how to troubleshoot service problems.
- Unpredictable Incidents and Downtime: Unplanned incidents and downtime can severely disrupt business operations. These issues often lead to decreased productivity, lost revenue, and can directly impact a company’s brand and reputation. To overcome this, IT operations and engineering teams must look for ways to forecast performance and anticipate issues before they impact the business or worse, customers.
- Recommendations: Splunk ITSI can provide early warning signs of potential incidents, guide teams to take preemptive action, and even automate runbooks. Watch how to proactively prevent incidents and predict outages up to 30 minutes before they happen.
Curious about what’s new in ITSI to help prioritize and respond to key challenges?
Significantly enhance your ability to manage and resolve incidents with ITSI’s new Service Impact Analysis (GA) from the 4.19 release. Now identify the origin of problems for any degraded service and rank the top contributors (e.g., KPIs) by priority to reduce manual investigations and provide a quick starting point for troubleshooting.
Stories You Can Replicate
Learning about how others have implemented ITSI to exceed their goals can provide valuable insight and inspiration for your own deployment. Below are noteworthy examples of how others have achieved significant operational improvements and what it meant for their business:
- By implementing ITSI, Leidos reduced event noise by 95-99%, scaling down from 3,500-5,000 to just 50-200 actionable events.
- This telecom giant drastically reduced incidents across more than 5,000 network exchanges by 90% and increased their customer NPS score by 22 points.
Conclusion
Ahead of Part 2 of this blog, you should now understand how to get started, prioritize and extract the most value for your time, and know what best practices align with your organization’s mission. To make the most of your discoveries, we invite you to explore ITSI’s comprehensive training resources and join our vibrant user community. Look for Part 2 of this guide to learn about more advanced use cases, optimization, and ways to leverage additional tooling.
