Paddy Power to combine insight from Splunk and customer data in new big data project

CIO Fin Goulding explains how Splunk use has gone from the security team to operations, and its next stop is business analytics

Bookmaker Paddy Power is looking to combine insight from operational intelligence tool Splunk and its customer data in a new big data project, according to the company's CIO Fin Goulding.

Goulding told Computing at Splunk Live in London last week that the firm is currently using AppDynamics and Splunk as performance management tools in order to gain insight into what is happening with its systems.

"Splunk gives us a lot of information around the current health of the systems... and it was first introduced through the security team because they wanted to know who was doing what and whose fingerprints were on what things, then it moved into our operational infrastructure teams in terms of app monitoring, and now we're looking at potentially moving towards business analytics and combining this data with customer data," he said.

"Even though it has come from a very techy background, this platform is a big data solution and that's what we've always been struggling with - getting insight with big data," he added.

Goulding believes that Splunk is predominantly used by technical specialists in operations or security, and that at events like Splunk Live, most of the speakers come from one of those two areas, rather than from data analytics, marketing, or even Internet of Things specialists.

So does Splunk need a new product in order to appeal to other areas of the business?

"I think the engine is capable [as it is], it's really down to how people use it and it's really about making sure people are trained and have the right skills, so it's not necessarily down to the product," Goulding suggested.

"It's probably down to people like me to create custom views to make it easier to use, and it's not necessarily something you'd buy off the shelf. But perhaps [creating a new product] is something that Splunk people are looking at," he said.

Current benefits

Goulding said that firms with a large estate like Paddy Power get to know quite quickly when something goes wrong as data is being analysed in real-time.

"For instance if your apps are running on hundreds of virtual machines and one is broken, you might not see that in your normal monitoring tools. [But with Splunk] you get to find out what that is and take the necessary action and also show business execs that customers are coming back online," he explained.

Another benefit of Splunk's solution, said Goulding, is that if sales numbers don't look right, his team can go back and look at the technical issues that caused the problem.

"Sometimes [previously] you'd just say ‘something happened and we got a bunch of 404s and we don't know why' - now we can find out why," he claimed.

"When you're building apps in the DevOps world and you've got a lot of small teams and they are implementing on a daily basis and a lot of change is going on - [Splunk] can verify that everything is fitting correctly and performing correctly and that's what we predominantly use it for," he added.

And Goulding emphasised again that the insight gleaned could be used in different ways.

"Security people are looking for breaches - or something negative, as are operational guys, where as business intelligence people are thinking about how they can use that to extend or get additional customers for additional business," he said.

So why Splunk and what are the alternatives?

"For us it was the right solution because the amount of work that's been put in to create this as a solution was perfect. There are open source alternatives which smaller companies will use, but you start to run out of runway with those," Goulding explained.

"You're at the hands of community support rather than a large commercial entity, plus [with a larger firm] you get the learning from all the other companies that are actually using the platform," he added.

Paddy Power sees Splunk as an "enterprise level tool" as opposed to "just a log management tool", and Goulding said that the product was robust, highly scalable, and has so far not given the bookmaker an issues.

"It's one of the solutions we've never had any problems with, it sounds strange but you put it in and it works, it doesn't necessarily break down and I don't remember us having an issue and having to go to Splunk and say it's not working," he concluded.