Arlo Optimizes Internal Operations to Protect Customer Data

Imagine a simple way to protect and connect with people and places you love most.

That's the mission behind Arlo, which equips users with award-winning IoT devices that range from wireless security cameras to advanced baby monitors. Currently managing a daily average of 127 million video events across 13.3 million devices, Arlo enables users to keep an eye on things that matter — from children and pets to homes and businesses.

To fulfil its commitment to its more than 3.4 registered households across 100 countries, Arlo must ensure its data and systems are secure while delivering an exceptional customer experience.

Private Moments, Advanced Security

“At Arlo, we take security very seriously because we’re holding onto such private moments for our consumers,” says Jishnu Kinwar, VP of cloud platform engineering at Arlo. “Security is at the heart of all we do — whether it’s the systems we put in place or the products we launch.”

With this security-first approach in mind, Arlo sought a comprehensive platform that could bring data to everything, replacing homegrown tools that lacked functional monitoring and the ability to debug incidents in production. As a cloud-first organization, Arlo selected Splunk Cloud, which enables the team to focus on business operations and strategy rather than IT infrastructure maintenance.

To ensure its 13.3 million IoT devices are reliable and secure for customers, Arlo uses Splunk for real-time systems monitoring and troubleshooting, which helps the organization proactively identify and mitigate threats before a breach occurs.

Arlo relies on Splunk for full operational visibility, which helps the company maintain its competitive edge, innovate faster and improve the experience. “Customer satisfaction is very important to us,” says Suma Potluri, senior manager of cloud infrastructure.

Thanks to this monitoring, Arlo turns its real-time data into action. With previous tools, the mean time to investigate (MTTI) a single production incident could span days, resulting in frustrated team members and costly productivity losses. But thanks to Splunk, Arlo has slashed MTTI from days to hours — or, in many cases, minutes. “Our lower MTTI helps us inform our customer support teams of incidents right away, so they can better serve our customer,” Kinwar says.

With optimized internal operations, Arlo’s DevOps and QA teams have increased productivity and accelerated innovation. “Our previous lack of visibility prevented us from moving at a fast pace,” Kinwar says. “But Splunk supports the team velocity to develop products and features faster while giving us the confidence to release sooner.” By using a Splunk dashboard to display log errors and exceptions, the engineering team has also improved the quality of its code for faster, more reliable product performance and happier customers.

Splunk has organically spread throughout Arlo. While the organization’s cloud operations and security teams were first to adopt Splunk, it wasn’t long before engineering and QA realized the value of the platform and began using it to unearth new insights within their data. Splunk’s SignalFx acquisition also presents new data possibilities for Arlo. “Splunk and SignalFx are a very good fit,” Kinwar says. “Very few companies have the ability to look at every single event in real time, which would be a huge benefit to us.”

Moving forward, Arlo will bring Splunk to a variety of new teams such as web and marketing, as well as new use cases around IT infrastructure monitoring and predictive analytics. While the team already uses the Splunk Machine Learning Toolkit to uncover data outliers, they will soon use it for time series forecasting and auto-scaling models. The organization also plans to use Splunk to aggregate and analyze data from its millions of IoT devices, helping Arlo deliver the reliable, secure experience its customers love and expect.