Increased visibility into performance and infrastructure

Following our previous engagement with a major South Australian government department, Chamonix was re-engaged to provide additional development services for their Splunk monitoring and data analytics platform. This engagement was to focus on application and service performance monitoring, ITSM real-time insights, network availability and user onboarding.

Shifting from security and the Enterprise Security Splunk SIEM tooling, this phase of the project focused on configuring and building service monitoring in the Splunk Observability Suite – primarily with Splunk Infrastructure Service Intelligence (ITSI). Using the ITSI platform, Chamonix has ingested perfmon infrastructure and application metrics from hundreds of servers including basic Windows and Linux operating system metrics, application log files, tomcat/IIS response metrics, and SQL server database performance statistics. The work in ITSI has also allowed Chamonix to assist our client to develop robust and up-to-date service dependency mappings within applications which has helped the organisation better understand how to support their applications.

Network monitoring was an additional infrastructure area added to the project when it was highlighted that our customer’s team had limited visibility into network performance issues that could impact application service delivery. Our customer operates a network of thousands of switches, routers, and wireless access points with limited visibility to the operations of the network. Utilising Splunk Cloud, Chamonix are ingesting network performance data using syslog and SNMP polling of devices to provide high-level performance data across all sites in the organisation, and alert Network Operations staff of issues as they arise. Work is also underway to build network performance data into ITSI service trees to link network issues to application delivery which will ultimately reduce time-to-resolution of issues and ensure that time is spent fixing issues, rather than identifying the cause of issues.

Additionally, Chamonix has worked extensively with the Service Desk operations teams and Service Managers within our client’s organisation to understand service delivery to assist with building visibility and exposure into the team’s processes. Our work to ingest data from ticket queues, issue resolution performance, distribution of work and response and resolution times have highlighted improvements that can be implemented in organisational structure and processes to deliver a higher level of service to internal customers and provide insights into day-to-day operations of the team.