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Reduce E-Commerce Store Downtime with Splunk Alerts
The company lacked an e-commerce web functionality monitor, due to which they faced significant downtime and revenue loss. Read how our Managed Services team implemented near real-time monitoring by integrating Splunk alerts.
The Client
A well-known American manufacturer of skincare products with $1.5B annual sales.
The Challenge
The company struggled to monitor their e-commerce website's functionality effectively, resulting in costly downtime and revenue loss. The daily site verification (DSV) jobs were in place to verify the site's functionality and were not providing timely and accurate enough results. The lack of immediate issue reporting meant that the support team could not take proactive measures to address them, leading to further financial losses. The company needed a more efficient way to check the web functionality of its site.
In brief, the company was looking for:
- Timely monitoring: Because the current system only ran tests once per day, problems could go unresolved for almost 24 hours. They wanted a solution that could perform monitoring more frequently.
- Adaptable thresholds: They needed a solution that could adapt to traffic patterns that changed throughout a 24-hour cycle.
- Intelligent alerting: Although the system in place provided test results and other raw data, they needed a solution that could automatically detect issues and raise alerts.
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Automation
E-Commerce
Healthcare
Managed Services
The Solution
After carefully analyzing company requirements, our Managed Services team integrated a Splunk Cloud Platform into its solution. Splunk provides a highly scalable data stream processing engine that combines security with observability and machine learning (ML).
Leveraging Splunk’s out-of-the-box (OOTB) observability features and the powerful Splunk Query Language, our team created 140 unique hourly site verification (HSV) alerts designed to call out any application discrepancies. The automated solution allows the company to respond to and correct issues within an hour.
Thresholds for the alerts are segregated based on the expected traffic on the site. During high transaction periods, thresholds are stringent. In contrast, during moderate or low transaction periods, thresholds are adjusted as appropriate to site user traffic.
For example, an alert will trigger if the number of orders in an hour exceeds a hundred during high transaction periods. On the other hand, during low transaction periods, alerts trigger when the number of transactions is less than ten.
The new system also defines intelligent alerts. These alerts differ from HSV alerts because they detect any potential performance degradation by comparing the thresholds within the last hour or day. Corrective action follows after identifying the performance impact. To illustrate, if 1000 orders were placed on the previous day at 4 PM, an alert triggers if the system detects a decrease in orders by more than 20% the following day.
Here are some key aspects of our solution:
- Hourly monitoring: The new system performs automated site functionality monitoring hourly rather than daily. Comprehensive monitoring vastly increases the likelihood of spotting and correcting an issue promptly.
- Routine and intelligent alerts: Our team introduced over 140 new alerts into the new system. The alerts represent a combination of ordinary alerts concerned with essential application health. In addition, the new design includes intelligent alerts able to detect potential issues.
- Adaptive thresholds: Alerts thresholds in the new system are designed based on the user traffic. Thresholds are adjusted based on usage tiers which increases monitoring accuracy.
Business Impact
The key business benefits of our solution include:
- Assured revenue flow: The new system performs 24 x 7 automated monitoring of critical e-commerce web functionality. This allows the support team to respond immediately, avoiding potential revenue loss.
- Frees up resources: Our automated system reduces the manual effort previously required to verify each functionality when a DSV script fails. Now vital resources can devote their time to more critical issues, such as improving the infrastructure, leading to even greater future profit.
- High availability: The e-commerce website is now 99.99% available since vital system functionality problems can now be corrected quickly.
Technologies Used
Splunk Query Language: A powerful and flexible search language used to query and analyze machine-generated data in real-time, enabling users to gain valuable insights and actionable intelligence from their dataSplunk Cloud Platform: A data analytics and machine learning platform that enables organizations to collect, monitor, analyze, and visualize machine data from any source in real-time
