The challenge is to reduce the complexity of operation management as the number of customers for cloud-based services increases.

B-to-B marketing in Japan is an undeveloped land, and compared to overseas companies with excellent marketing, the profit margin is low, and there is a lot of room for efficiency improvement. SHANON Inc. (Shannon) is a leading company in the marketing field that specializes in seminars and events, capturing the needs of such companies.

Based on the concept of "a new standard in marketing," the company has developed the "Shannon Marketing Platform," a cloud-based marketing platform that realizes strategic communication through the automation and efficiency of operations and integrated data management. there is The feature is that it is equipped with various functions that dramatically streamline the operational flow of seminars. Acquired a high reputation as a service to change. It is currently used by over 200 companies.

Since 2010, Shannon has adopted Scrum, an agile development method, for the development of its marketing platform, and has expanded its functions in response to customer requests. As a result, the number of application releases increased, sometimes three times a week. However, in the course of continuing such development and operation, several issues arose. One of them was a performance problem in the web application, and a phenomenon was occurring that only specific customers and specific functions were slow.

The marketing platform is a multi-tenant application with 400 functional modules for hundreds of domains. As a result, the number of items subject to quality checks for all domains has reached a huge number exceeding tens of thousands. According to Mr. Fujikura of the Technology Management Headquarters, ``It takes a lot of hard work and effort to identify and investigate the cause of an error from among tens of thousands of target items, and to detect errors in advance. It took time,” he recalls.

Another issue is the rapid increase in the number of inquiries to the technical support department due to the increase in the number of customers. The technical support department investigates the cause and provides appropriate solutions when receiving questions or reports of problems regarding the marketing platform from departments that serve as the primary contact point for customers, such as customer support and implementation departments. If the technical support department received a problem that could not be answered, it was escalated to the development team. There have also been obstacles to development.

Visualize access logs to improve customer support

Shannon will begin considering the introduction of a logging tool to resolve these issues. Initially, they considered developing the tool in-house, but gave up on it because it would require a huge amount of development time. While considering multiple logging tools, the final choice was Splunk, provided by Macnica. The reason for this is that in addition to being able to solve the problems Shannon was facing, it is easy to implement and costs are lower than in-house development. Shannon decided to adopt Splunk and began implementation work in June 2010. After testing and verification, actual operation began in February 2011.

Let's take a look at the effects of introducing Splunk. First, for performance issues, we used Splunk to monitor all response times for all customers, all functions, hundreds of customers, hundreds of functions, and tens of thousands of patterns. By comparing the performance values of the day before and the day before based on the results, it became possible to easily identify which function module of which customer is causing the problem. As a result, they were able to build a system that can deal with performance-related complaints from customers before they develop into problems.

Next, let's look at the effects of the introduction in technical support. When receiving an inquiry from a customer, refer to Splunk and conduct a survey on "what kind of request was made" and "what kind of operation was performed". As a result, it is said that it has become possible to respond to customer's setting mistakes and operation mistakes on the spot to some extent. Mr. Hirasaki, a technical support engineer, explains as follows.

“Previously, it took a lot of time to search the debug log and find where the request was written.However, using Splunk to search for the unique ID issued by the web application , the ID and debug log file are uniquely linked, so the results are displayed immediately.The time to search for the file is zero, and the overall investigation time is shortened by 3 to 5 times. As a result, we are now able to respond to many survey requests.”

Furthermore, even if a problem arises that must be escalated to the development team, the technical support department first investigates it with Splunk, and the cause of the problem can be narrowed down to some extent, reducing the burden on the development team to investigate the cause. ing.

Ease of operation is highly evaluated, and various usage methods are being promoted within the company

Splunk is also rated for its ease of use. “The evaluation point of using it is that the search screen is very easy to use. It spread naturally throughout the company, such as starting to use it,” says Fujikura.

Splunk also seems to play a role in improving customer service. We have received many survey requests from our customers, such as "whether or not the application is accessed", "how many times the application was accessed during this period", and "how the access situation has changed compared to one or two years ago". However, the conventional system could only refer to the debug log, and it took a lot of time to deal with it, so they had to refuse. On the other hand, ``Splunk allows you to see the search results at a glance by specifying the URL, and it is also possible to classify and display them in graphs by period. It is now possible to easily respond to requests for investigations regarding access histories,” says Hirasaki.

Regarding the future use of Splunk, Shannon says, "I want to register all access logs and visualize all statuses related to the system with Splunk." For example, if database transaction logs and SQL can be registered and Splunk can consistently search application logs and database search histories from http requests, we expect that it will lead to improved speed and accuracy in responding to customers. .

Looking back on the introduction of Splunk this time, Mr. Fujikura talks about the prospects as follows.
“Splunk is a tool that is fun to use. So, in the future, we will increase the number of users by telling various staff members how to use it, saying, 'There are ways to use it.' We want everyone to be able to use Splunk.”

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