Predictive IT

Inundations of events, complex, interconnected services, organizational silos, and stringent SLAs are a few of the elements that make managing IT operations more than a bit turbulent. Moreover, whole enterprises rely on IT personnel to avoid failures, particularly those that adversely impact the customer experience. The best forward-thinking IT firms navigate through the noise and quickly identify the problem's root cause. However, this is just the first step. With Splunk IT Service Intelligence, these teams are also leveraging machine learning to identify aberrant activity and prevent outages before they occur (ITSI).

The Challenges

Due to the following obstacles, Don Mahler, Director of Performance Management at Leidos, sought a solution that could unite sub-departments, IT and functional silos and triage a deluge of events spanning more than 120 IT services.

• Required monitoring and response for 24/7 client access.
• Separate silos led to the Balkanization of the IT department.
• Required reduction of hundreds of notifications and events

Business Impact

In addition to basic requirements such as consolidating events from its heterogeneous IT environment, detecting and suppressing duplicate alerts, clearing solved alerts, and distilling them down to actionable events, the company required additional functionality such as automatically escalating an alert after a certain period of time or suppressing one when a device was intentionally taken offline. Leidos accomplished this using Splunk ITSI. "There are days when you get a deluge of events; Splunk ITSI prioritizes the events and provides instant insight into not just that something is wrong but also what has been impacted," Mahler explains.

According to Mahler, the Splunk platform breaks down barriers by allowing teams to see data throughout the service stack. Today, approximately 20 management systems, ranging from Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) to SolarWinds network management tools, as well as more than 4,500 configuration items (CIs) across 120 IT services and 240 locations worldwide, feed Splunk ITSI at Leidos, enabling the company to reduce 3,500 to 5,000 daily alerts to approximately 50 tickets for network and datacenter operations to act upon. Passing CMDB data to Splunk ITSI enables alternative alert displays for various staff members. The bottom line: simpler access to more relevant data, with staff time dedicated to the most important challenges.

Splunk ITSI

Splunk ITSI is a monitoring and analytics system that provides insight across IT and business services and allows the use of artificial intelligence to transition from a reactive to a predictive and preventive IT strategy. With artificial intelligence driven by machine learning, Splunk ITSI anticipates how services will be affected before they occur and reduces event noise, giving you more time to concentrate on projects that will advance your organization's agility and competitiveness.

Download Leidos's whitepaper to learn more about Predictive IT only on Whitepapers Online.