RetailT
echnology
©John Lewis
Lewis IT team used custom scripts and multiple monitoring tools for simple log shipping and parsing. However, only certain individuals had the skillset required to extract information from key systems using traditional tools such as Perl, AWK or Grep. With no ‘self-service’ available across the
organisation and limited staff resources, support requests had to be prioritised, leading to stretched mean time to repair (MTTR) timeframes for all but the most crucial requests. In addition, without the ability to baseline ‘normal’ in order to compare real-time to historical data, the team could not proactively detect and correct anomalies. John Lewis needed a solution that would give
the company operational visibility across its entire infrastructure and allow it to address issues before they could negatively impact the organisation. John Lewis initially deployed Splunk software
in 2011 for alerting, direct searching and graphing on John Lewis’ IT infrastructure. The retailer soon realised it could use Splunk to gain more insights into the business when it launched a new e-commerce platform in March 2013. Aleem Cummins, release manager and Splunk lead at John Lewis, explained that the initial motivation behind the deployment of Splunk at John Lewis has evolved from simple logging at first, to mining and beyond, to generating operational intelligence. The John Lewis team now uses Splunk
Enterprise for complex analytics, including trend analysis, visualisations, customer behaviour modelling, incident analysis, problem management and complex alerting. Splunk Enterprise provides the intelligence to make key business decisions, from the IT, web and marketing departments
www.retailtechnology.co.uk
to senior stakeholders of
johnlewis.com. It also influences capacity planning for peak times and troubleshooting. “Within weeks of implementing Splunk, we saw a substantial return on investment,” said Cummins. “We discovered we were losing customers with
a certain version of a web browser at checkout, for example. Insights from Splunk Enterprise identified and helped to resolve the problem and protect our revenues.” “Information that exists in logs is not an
interpretation of the truth, it is the truth, therefore if you can search that, correlate and make sense of it then there’s no end to the value you can get from that.” “I’m kind of a cross between Bear Grylls and
I’m kind of a cross between Bear Grylls and Ban Ki-moon... there are a lot of things to take on board and know
Ban Ki-moon because there are a lot of things you need to take on board and a lot of things you need to know,” he mused. “I’m not an expert in business intelligence [BI] at all, but I’m an expert in Splunk. Yet because we may be looking at the same set of data, I can make informed comment and input that can be useful. Therefore, Splunk is a disruptive technology.” Over the key Christmas clearance period in 2013,
Splunk Enterprise was one of the reasons John Lewis delivered the best online performance in company’s history. Online sales grew over 23% over the holiday period and Splunk Enterprise is credited with helping the organisation make important operational and marketing decisions, such as when to promote certain items or campaigns. “If you’ve seen pictures of NASA mission control with dozens of screens, that’s pretty much what we do here every time we have a clearance,” explained Cummins. “We set up
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