Team Agility with The Splunk Platform

In continuing my DevOps series I talked about how my journey at Splunk sparked my drive to help our customers get a better understanding of application delivery cycle. I briefly talked about DevOps methodology and basic concepts. But the most important element is how your team responds to DevOps–driven workflow.

DevOps teams use numerous types of project management tools while many companies are looking to move into a Scrum process flow or become a full agile shop. Tools like Atlassian’s JIRA, Version One, and Rally enable teams to see the value of their work by tracking project tasks in Sprints that can represents various work periods. Teams that follow this type of flow have a better understanding of items that are work in progress, backlogs, or bugs.

But what happens when you want to link tasks and bugs to production Outages? These tools cannot really correlate elements together or give you the ability to alert or predict on what may happen next. The importance of collecting this data is a valuable tool for DevOps teams. They can see what their velocity is and how it impacts their SLA’s and customer sentiment. Below is an example of an end-to-end framework in relating to how the Splunk platform links everything together.

With the Splunk platform and the power of your agile rockstar team, you can easily map events like tasks and code submissions in your build process and see problems as they’re happening and build a little data science behind it to predict issues.

One of the many use cases that I have worked on with one of our Spunk customers is described below. This use case allowed a DevOps team to take a stack like Atlassian and show the value in all data stored in each tool to help determine how their toolchain functions together in their pipeline. With this information they are able to find issues in coding and release management to pinpoint issues faster and reduce outages due to code quality.

As you can see, Splunk software takes a full development pipeline and can correlate it using Splunk Enterprise or Splunk IT Service Intelligence. This illustrates how extracting details and elements together can really show you events in real-time to help detect problems before moving your workloads into production (because this is ultimately what’s important in today’s fast growing world of micro services and fully redundant environments).

In summary, the Splunk platform gives you the ability to drive more success with your DevOps initiatives. It can help you build that true end-to-end framework with real-time analytics. If you can harness the power of the Splunk platform nothing is out of reach for your team and your customers. Please stay tuned for my next blog post where I will focus on code quality assurance and APM. Until then, please check out our DevOps webpage, and explore the many apps we have available on Splunkbase.

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Thanks!
Domnick Eger