Kumu Achieves 99.9% Service Uptime With Holistic Observability

Key Challenges

Siloed applications prevented kumu from resolving system outages, resulting in steep costs.

Key Results

After centralizing and automating data analytics with Splunk, kumu achieved full-stack visibility, which helped the platform maximize uptime and deliver a seamless user experience.

Download PDF

When your user base explodes, keeping up is the only option.

Kumumedia International (kumu) is the largest social entertainment platform in the Philippines. With roughly 20 million app downloads across the world and 60 million livestreams watched per month, kumu is now one of the highest-grossing apps around. Because kumu continually rolls out new features and services to meet the needs of its rapidly growing user base, it adopted a multicloud approach with core applications sitting on Amazon Web Services and new satellite applications on Google Cloud.

However, kumu’s growth led to unexpected traffic spikes and platform crashes during peak times, which meant it sometimes had to cancel a live-streaming event, disappointing thousands of users that had planned to watch and eroding the company’s revenue and reputation. The company's siloed infrastructure was the root of the problem. It consisted of heterogeneous, open-source solutions and monitoring tools that made troubleshooting laborious and time-consuming. What's more, because of its spiking traffic, kumu struggled with runaway costs and with forecasting total annual spend with its existing monitoring and analytics vendor, leading to tough conversations with its management and finance teams.

Kumu needed an observability solution with a predictable pricing model and all-around visibility to accelerate troubleshooting and service recovery, and improve user experience. And Splunk was the answer.

Outcomes

99.9% service uptime
70%+ less manpower for multicloud monitoring
75% faster troubleshooting

Transforming user experience with maximum uptime

Adopting Splunk was a gamechanger for kumu’s service uptime. Real-time monitoring across clouds and end-to-end visibility into applications gave kumu’s teams instant feedback on service availability. They could skip manual reviews of different systems, and get right to identifying and resolving potential issues before they affected users.

The Splunk platform also turns data into actionable insights about applications and infrastructure, helping kumu optimize performance, reduce downtime and improve user satisfaction. Gone are the days of unforeseeable system failures; kumu’s systems now have an impressive 99.9% service uptime.

“Splunk has also made technology integration a breeze,” Ellard Capiral, vice president of engineering at kumu, says. “Splunk Observability readily integrates with a wide range of tools and technologies, including cloud providers, databases and other monitoring tools. This gives us an all-encompassing picture of our IT environment through intuitive dashboards and improves our overall monitoring capabilities.”

Splunk offers us a robust solution for monitoring, troubleshooting and optimizing our applications and infrastructure in the complex multicloud environment.

Ellard Capiral, Vice President of Engineering, kumu

Solutions:

Contact Sales

Getting more done with less

Splunk’s automation capabilities have not only expedited issue identification and remediation, they also minimized the risk of human error. “We previously had seven people tasked with monitoring the multicloud environment, but two is more than enough now,” Capiral says. “What’s more, it used to take about two hours for us to find and fix a performance issue, but now everything is done within 30 minutes.” This means kumu has been saving more than 70% of its manpower in system monitoring, freeing up the team to focus on more critical tasks. What’s more, troubleshooting is 75% faster than before.

Scaling and securing for the future

Through it all, Splunk’s pricing model offers the flexibility kumu needs, while eliminating runaway costs and budget surprises. Unlike data volume-based pricing which can be unpredictable, Splunk Observability looks at usage based on average usage over 30 days and charges customers according to the number of devices or hosts they want to analyze, protect and monitor. As a result, kumu no longer deals with excessive costs and can predict observability spend. Kumu can introduce new functions and scale to unlimited data volumes and simply plan for the number of assets protected.

The scalability of Splunk Observability also supports the rapid growth of kumu’s user base. “We have different environments throughout the company, where some only have a few servers and some have massive distributed systems,” Capiral says. “As the Splunk solution is highly scalable, it allows us to monitor and manage large, complex environments with ease.”

In addition to observability, kumu is also using Splunk to strengthen its cybersecurity posture. Splunk Incident Intelligence unifies on-call management, incident response and troubleshooting, further reducing unplanned downtime. The company is better positioned to fulfill its mission to champion Filipino voices and engage users around the world.