Luxury Auto Network Opts for IT Service Intelligence to Improve Business Performance

Splunk IT Service Intelligence + Ironstream Drives Excellence

A luxury automotive network is expected to deliver the type of value its discriminating buyers anticipate. For the Americas arm of one European luxury auto maker, that value for wasn’t up to par due to lagging business performance.

Business application performance that ensures that customer service operations deliver the value that the most discriminating Americas arm for a luxury European auto maker was striving to meet and overcome. Besides the company’s own IT systems, it must also effectively support continual interactions with the
disparate IT systems at several hundred associated dealerships nationwide.

For a time, however, the company’s IT staff was often becoming aware of application problems only after a dealership complained directly to the CIO. (Not good.) The thing that was missing was real-time monitoring of key performance indicators (KPIs), especially for its CICS and DB2 apps.

In IT industry parlance, what this challenge called for was an IT service intelligence solution, and the premier industry solution is offered by Splunk Inc. with its revolutionary Splunk IT Service Intelligence™ premium app. So far, so good – at least as far as the various distributed systems were concerned.

Obviously, however, the vitally important CICS and DB2 mainframe performance logs were not part of the distributed systems. They were secured in “the glass house” – the company’s z/OS mainframe environment. That inner sanctum of enterprise data is normally not easily or cost-effectively accessible from the distributed environment. For this company, getting those mainframe data feeds into the Splunk platform in real time for service-centric diagnostics was crucial.

The company demands the best for both its customers and its dealership networks worldwide. It rightfully expects IT to drive value and competitive advantage – not be the source of issues from that dealer network. They want service to be 100% focused on selling and delivering a world-class experience.