RiverSafe cuts SMBC’s troubleshooting workload by three days a week with Splunk automation and monitoring.

The challenge

Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation Group (SMBC) is a multinational banking and financial services firm, based in Tokyo, Japan.

The DSG IT team in EMEA are responsible for the management of business critical applications across SMBC’s 20 global offices in Europe and the Middle East, including its Microsoft operating systems and its Azure cloud environment.

Despite being tasked with running such a large digital landscape, the team had no effective visibility into system performance or the root cause of IT issues. They had no clear view of server capacity, application health, or what was causing alerts—and more importantly, how these issues were affecting overall system performance.

This created a lot of challenges, including a high manual workload. As a result of this lack of visibility into their systems, a huge amount of the team’s time was spent manually troubleshooting issues and conducting time-consuming investigative checks.

Complicating this visibility issue further, SMBC’s IT support team use a follow-the-sun workflow with issues being passed to teams in other global locations around the clock. However, there were no clear processes in place for handing over issues, making it even more difficult for the team to trace and resolve issues.

The solution

To increase visibility across the firm’s digital landscape, SMBC decided to implement Splunk Enterprise to gain oversight into infrastructure and server capacity, and Splunk ITSI to enable the IT team to monitor and gather insights from applications.

As an accredited Splunk Partner and Premier Professional Services Provider, RiverSafe was brought in to design, plan, and implement the two Splunk platforms. As well as delivering on the roll-out, SMBC also wanted to gain an understanding from RiverSafe’s experts about these new tools and the various ways Splunk could be applied to add value and solve business challenges.

Providing a consultancy-led approach, RiverSafe’s team began by getting to understand exactly what SMBC wanted from Splunk, working closely with SMBC to ensure they got to grips with the technology.

After designing SMBC’s Splunk system, creating the schematic, and implementing it, RiverSafe conducted numerous workshops and training sessions to transfer useful knowledge. These sessions were conducted with different teams from across the business to equip them with practical expertise around Splunk’s relevant applications, functionality, and best practices.

RiverSafe also offered advice on next steps and contingency planning, putting scenarios in place and creating step-by-step plans to help SMBC recover quickly in the event of any system outages. Finally, the team set up a DBA monitoring plug in to give database owners visibility and allow them to proactively spot potential capacity and outage issues.

Originally recommended to SMBC by a Splunk reseller, RiverSafe has now expanded its relationship with the bank. After seeing the benefits of implementing Splunk, and the quality of RiverSafe’s service, SMBC has now engaged RiverSafe to roll out the product to other areas of the business.

The outcome

The implementation of Splunk has led to significant benefits for the SMBC IT team. By automating manual activities, the team now has more time to spend on high-value work. They also spend less time and energy manually checking server capacity and application performance—now, they get useful, accurate alerts when issues occur and have dashboards in place to provide better visibility.

RiverSafe set up a Splunk Glasstable dashboard for the team, bringing all reports together in one place and making them accessible to teams across the world. This unified view has been instrumental in creating smoother processes and ensuring everyone is informed of ongoing issues.

As a result of the Splunk implementation by RiverSafe, SMBC’s IT team spend three fewer days a week on troubleshooting alone. This significant chunk of time has now been freed up to allow the team to focus on other areas and provide better service across the business.

“RiverSafe took a very proactive and hands-on approach,” said Simon Perrins, Vice President, Systems Infrastructure at SMBC.  “They were always very responsive and quick to help with any issue we had. They looked at our challenges, really understood them, and came up with a solution that tackled them.

“RiverSafe are clearly experts in Splunk; everyone was very technically astute. The team gave us great examples of what we could do with the platform and had a wealth of knowledge that they were happy to share with us. They had both the technical knowledge and experience to ensure we got the best possible solution with our Splunk environment.” Simon Perrins, Vice President, Systems Infrastructure at SMBC.

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