IDC Frontier Speeds Up Failure Response Over 80% With Splunk

Key Challenges

As its business expanded, IDC Frontier had to proactively monitor more systems and manage increased incident alerts, but its legacy operation monitoring platform wasn’t able to promptly respond to failures.

Key Results

With Splunk, IDCF now automates its alert management, expediting analysis to proactively prevent major issues and improve customer experience.

Download the PDF

You can’t respond to a problem you don’t see.

That’s why visibility is key to IDC Frontier Inc. (IDCF), an operator of large-scale data centers in the Tokyo metropolitan area and across Japan. This is especially true as the company expands, providing network security, operation monitoring and other high-quality data center solutions to new clients in the country.

As more of its clients moved their IT systems to the cloud, IDCF’s cloud provisioning platform continued to grow in size. Various systems and virtual machines generated more logs, including a large volume of alert-related logs — all of which required quick analysis to determine the location of the outage or failure.

But IDCF’s legacy operation monitoring system couldn’t keep up, and hindered the company’s ability to swiftly respond to issues across the changing business environment. Now with fully automated alert management with Splunk Enterprise and Splunk IT Service Intelligence (ITSI), IDCF teams can quickly respond to issues, improving customer service as the business grows.

Outcomes

Nearly 100% automated alert management
More than 80% faster failure response
100 employees use tailored dashboards to access real-time insights

Automation ushers in a new chapter of monitoring

“Our business environment changed dramatically and the old operational management system was not powerful enough to cope,” says Kazuhisa Matsumoto, director of IDCF’s cloud engineering division at the cloud engineering general headquarters. With IDCF’s legacy system, teams needed to manually determine which customers were impacted and how to contact them, which was very time consuming. This became a bigger issue as the number of systems increased — teams struggled to navigate a tremendous volume of alerts and issue a prompt response.

With Splunk, IDCF teams automatically aggregate and analyze alerts from multiple systems, streamlining and expediting the initial failure response process. Teams are quickly able to identify impacted systems, notify customers and escalate issues to relevant departments. The Splunk solution has also made budgeting far more straightforward with a pricing model based on data volume rather than on number of managed nodes, which fluctuate by the day.

Splunk ITSI also supports IDCF’s rapid growth, using machine learning to streamline alert resolution so teams can predict, detect and resolve incidents all from one place. And with the Splunk professional services team helping IDCF develop bespoke search processing language to handle alert messages from multiple sources, the company is supported as it grows to meet future needs.

Splunk enables us to automate and optimize IT management while seizing new business opportunities.

Kazuhisa Matsumoto, Director of Cloud Engineering Division, Cloud Engineering General Headquarters, IDC Frontier Inc.

Contact Sales

Industry:Communications

Accelerating initial failure response by over 80%

“Missing even a single event has critical implications in IT operation monitoring, so we worked hard to enable the new system to detect anything that the old one could,” says Matsumoto. With data scattered across different databases now centralized on the Splunk platform, and every manual step in the investigation process almost fully automated, Splunk quickly outperformed the company’s legacy solution — and reduced mean time to response by 80%.

Now 40 management engineers use Splunk to monitor daily operations, with all the details they need for specific alerts available on Splunk dashboards — and automations helping save time and resources.

New business opportunities and unlimited possibilities

With Splunk, IDCF can create different dashboards for as many as 100 users, helping teams visualize key performance indicators on a single pane of glass and turning data into unlimited possibilities.

IDCF is looking forward to extending Splunk into new use cases, such as security. “Moving forward, we would like to further automate and speed up IT management, from alert analysis all the way to failure recovery,” says Matsumoto. “With Splunk at the core of our IT management system, we can move the entire IT management process toward zero-touch operations, helping us seize new business opportunities as we grow.”