Pioneering DevOps adoption in the IA industry Problem discovery and improvement cycle established

Yokogawa Electric Corporation Corporation (Yokogawa Electric Corporation)'s IA (production control) business monitors and controls factory production at various plants such as petroleum, chemicals, steel, paper, gas, electric power, food, and pharmaceuticals. We provide production control systems and control equipment.

Among them, "CENTUM" (CENTUM of the world's first distributed control system (DCS), which brings together the best of our unique digital control technology and know-how. Since its launch in 1975, the flagship system has been adopted in more than 100 countries around the world for a total of 27,000 systems. Since control equipment such as plants can be used for several decades, successive generations of CENTUM are consistently compatible with each other during their life cycle, and they continue to evolve flexibly while constantly incorporating the latest technology. This is the reason why we have earned the deep trust of users in Japan and overseas.

Especially noteworthy is software development that incorporates DevOps (development culture improvement activities aimed at speeding up, improving quality, and improving efficiency through mutual cooperation between development and operation), which is pioneering for the manufacturing industry in the IA industry. working on Mr. Yo Funaki, section manager of the System Software Engineering Department, System Development Center, IA Systems & Services Business Headquarters, talks about the background of adopting DevOps as follows.
“Our DevOps is slightly different from the general DevOps used in agile development, and the Company regard it as DevOps for the purpose of giving priority to development quality and providing what users expect. The reason why we worked on this is probably because there were many engineers in the company who were sensitive to development trends in the world, and they had the mindset of combining conservative development with cutting-edge efforts. A cycle of noticing this and leading to improvements is taking root within the company.”

Splunk becomes a popular tool for grassroots information exchange

However, DevOps, which we have been working on for five years, will also reach a new milestone. They worked on test automation and CI/CD (continuous integration/continuous deployment), and although they were able to confirm certain results, they lost sight of their next goal. Tetsu Tada, group leader of the System Software Engineering Department, System Development Center, IA Systems & Services Business Headquarters, said, "To tackle DevOps, it is necessary to utilize a large number of related tools, but what each of them is trying to do is an error. Even if a disaster occurred, we were in a situation where we were unable to quickly and accurately grasp where it was happening,” recalls the situation at the time. In addition, we would like to have a complete understanding of various metrics and encourage awareness of bad points, but quality data is only held within the department, not shared, and confined to Excel files. It is said that it was a problem that it was not visualized.

Therefore, the IA System & Service Business Headquarters System Development Center utilizes the machine data analysis platform "Splunk Enterprise" (hereafter, Splunk). We tried visualization of file change history using CSV data from the version control system, aggregation work for quality data analysis, and so on.

In fact, this is not the first Splunk for Yokogawa Electric Corporation. Since the realization of web access log analysis with Splunk about five years ago, efforts to utilize Splunk have spread in various departments, and the usage scene has reached more than 10 cases.

Takumi Fujiwara, team leader of the System Software Technology Department, System Development Center, IA Systems & Services Business Division, said, ``Splunk is so popular that there is active grass-roots information exchange between different development departments within the company, and it has become a kind of... Furthermore, in February 2017, I received Macnica 's on-site training and received a lecture on using Splunk, so I decided to try inputting CENTUM's software development data. '' he explains.

As a result of the actual machine verification in May of the same year, a system that visualizes the number of files modified by developers and a system that automates the quality data analysis work that used to take several days using Excel macros were put into practical use. Since it was able to achieve a certain level of evaluation, activities were started toward its official introduction. “the Company accumulates failure information in a database, but it takes time to design and analyze something, and it was difficult to respond every time the requirements changed or the axis we wanted to see changed. In addition to being able to take in anything and give it meaning later, there is no need for an initial design, and the requirements we want to see can be solved as soon as they arise, so I felt a great potential," says Fujiwara.

In 1975, Yokogawa Electric Corporation launched "CENTUM", the world's first distributed control system (DCS), which was a collection of the best of its own digital control technology, experience, and know-how. Since its launch, a total of 27,000 systems have been adopted in more than 100 countries around the world.

Embracing DevOps and Splunk Creates Unexpected Value

After that, at the System Development Center of the IA Systems & Service Business Headquarters, a dashboard was created to visualize weekly tabulations of files modified by developers, changes in the amount of file modifications performed at overseas development bases, and the failure lifecycle. etc. are developed one after another. In addition, we used Splunk to link the change history data in the version control system with the data in the failure information database.

In the future, we plan to improve product quality by speeding up development and suppressing the occurrence of bugs by visualizing files that cause problems so that we can quickly identify them. is.

In addition, they are considering inputting log data from multiple DevOps tools into Splunk, and are planning to create a dashboard that can grasp what is currently happening and where in near real time.

Mr. Fujiwara says, "Currently, only data focused on the development department is put into Splunk, but in the future, if all complaints and incident information occurring in the field and on the customer side are aggregated in Splunk, the life of failures will be improved. The scope of the cycle will be further expanded, and new insights will be born.” “By being able to handle Splunk, I was faced with a variety of data on a daily basis, and I was constantly thinking about finding interesting solutions. I'm happy that I got a new tool." (Mr. Fujiwara)

On the other hand, Tada says that the biggest advantage of Splunk is its flexibility. “In particular, since the Company products have a long lifespan, the development environment itself has a long lifespan, and there are many Excel macros that we worked hard to create in the past, and many self-made systems. This is a common issue for Japanese companies. By introducing Splunk this time, we were able to prove that such legacy systems can also be incorporated, and I realized that Splunk is an indispensable tool for utilizing data.Japanese companies can make use of Splunk's strengths. I feel that

Funaki says that he sees great potential in modernizing development centered on DevOps. “By incorporating DevOps and Splunk, which were unlikely to be directly related in the manufacturing industry, new communication was born, and it became possible to create various unexpected values. It's important to have a mindset that allows you to have fun while proceeding with development.

Yokogawa Electric Corporation 's new medium-term management plan states that it will actively work to build an architecture that maximizes the use of digital technology in order to improve the productivity of the company and its customers. The culture of implementing functions and improving quality in order to increase the value of Yokogawa Electric Corporation together with the development department is spreading beyond the perspective of the work of the department.

It can be said that Splunk, which promotes its flexibility and insatiable challenge, has become established as an indispensable infrastructure for the company.

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