Spark turns to Splunk for network and operations monitoring

Spark New Zealand is using data analytics tools from Splunk to monitor its network and identify potential issues before they impact operation and services.

Splunk says Spark is using Splunk Enterprise and Splunk Enterprise Security (ES) to gain end-to-end visibility into all IT and security layers if its operations and support many of Spark’s products and services.

“The insights gained from Splunk solutions support internal business functions, in addition to improving customer care,” Splunk says.

“Real-time status updates on both mobile and broadband networks allow Spark to identify and remedy issues before customers experience a delay in service or connectivity. As a result, Spark’s IT operations have improved risk mitigation and are able to refine their security posture by reducing the number of products deployed on the network.”

Spark’s lead for IT operations, Niall Fitzgerald, said Spark’s use of Splunk had increased since its introduction and Spark planned to apply it for multiple use cases including business, IT and security operations.

“Spark has expanded its use of Splunk solutions more than 10 times, migrating tools and replacing legacy platforms to enable the utilisation of Splunk throughout the entire organisation,” he said.

Splunk is also used by Spark’s internal security team, providing security incident and event management (SIEM) through.

According to Splunk this allows Spark to quickly identify, triage and isolate anomalies in the technology stack that are causing security or operational issues.

“Furthermore, Spark has been able to leverage Splunk’s automation and machine learning capabilities across the business, meeting capacity demand level and increasing flexibility,” it said

Splunk looking beyond IT and security users

In recent months Splunk has flagged plans to expand the scope of its offering into the consumer and industrial IoT markets.

At its user conference last October Splunk announced Splunk Next, billed as a more forward-looking approach to product releases designed to bring “the power of Splunk to more data sources and more people no matter where, when or how they access that data to deliver limitless insights.”

In April 2018 Splunk announced Splunk Industrial Asset Intelligence, a pre-packaged set of analytical tools used on top of the Splunk Enterprise platform, designed for use in a wide range of IIoT applications.