Vodafone troubleshoots Oracle issue with Splunk analytics

Vodafone has eliminated thousands of IT support tickets being generated by a problematic Oracle stack by using a new analytics tool from Splunk.

The system, an Oracle Fusion Middleware application called Workforce Identity Access Management (WIAM), was used internally to register new staff and get them set up for work as quickly as possible, as well as move employees between departments.

But Oliver Hoppe, a consultant solution architect for Vodafone Group, told IT Pro it experienced problems from its launch last September.

"It got immediately thousands of tickets," he said. "It's an Oracle stack of seven or eight middleware components, plus Oracle DB, and some blue code in between."

The complexity of those integrations resulted in lots of technical issues, but it also meant that Vodafone's monitoring tools struggled to identify the root causes of those problems.

Employee accounts can be imported from Active Directory or other systems into the WIAM, then WIAM shares that account with dozens of other applications, from SharePoint to email to Vodafone's Lync implementation, to set the new user up with everything he or she needs.

Hoppe said: "It's important to the company that if there's a new employee that he can start working tomorrow or today even. So if this is not working, this is a problem."

With users complaining about WIAM's functionality, Hoppe decided to see if Splunk's new tool, IT Service Intelligence (ITSI), of which Vodafone was a trial user, could make a difference, implementing it over just two days in June.

"We needed one candidate we wanted to roll out with ITSI, so our intention was to take the most challenging service we could find," Hoppe said.

ITSI is effectively a troubleshooting and monitoring platform that collects terabytes of all kinds of data about a service, both structured and unstructured, real-time and historical, and lets users pinpoint whatever data they want and and turn it into trackable KPIs.

"If you see something in that deepdive, you can make an alert. You can turn any KPI into an alert," explained Johnathon Cervelli, Splunk's field leader for data-driven IT, on stage at the company's .conf2015 event in Las Vegas today.

The product allows IT to track how their services are performing at a deeply granular level, and Hoppe found it made a huge difference to troubleshooting his Oracle stack.

One incident involved the number of active sessions on Oracle Identity Manager growing and growing until it ran out of memory and the web interface crashed - a possible nightmare scenario for Vodafone as it tries to on-board new employees and manage its staff.

But Hoppe told IT Pro: "It really took them five minutes looking in ITSI and they immediately found out, 'oh we have stuck sessions'."

Creating a KPI for stuck sessions meant they could find and kill any such incidents, enabling the application to work again.

"The root cause of the sessions was solved two days later but for now we could directly kill the sessions with an Oracle manager application and people could start working again, logging in again," said Hoppe. "The full outage of a management tool is a disaster, but ITSI really helped Vodafone."

Now, "many people don't even open tickets anymore", he said, adding: "The visualisation enables people to explore the data more easily and ask questions."

ITSI is now available on-premise and on Splunk Cloud, and those interested in the latter can sign up for a free sandbox trial via Splunk's website.

Picture courtesy of Vodafone Medien