2. Cricket Company Overview
• Leading communication service provider
– $2.7 billion in revenues (FY 12)
– Approx. 4,300 employees
• Nationwide services offered include wireless voice and broadband
internet
• Approx. 5.9 million customers across the U.S.
• Launched unlimited MUVE music service in early 2011
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3. My Background & Role
• Senior Manager, Technical Operations Group
• Functions of the group:
– Operational responsibility for nationwide data
services
– Any device / any data service (e.g. music)
– Own the ‘end-to-end’ service => systems
focused
– How do we define and better monitor the
customer experience?
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4. Why Splunk?
• Visibility: Multiple service/transaction platforms and 3rd party
providers
• Reporting: Real-time Monitoring and Analytics
• Scale: Thousands of new subscribers per hour, hundreds of
interactions every minute = millions of events
• Efficiency: Take processing off the platform for
Developers/Engineering/Operations/. . . .
• Operational Intelligence: Huge operational gains and strategic
advantages through leveraging machine data
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5. Broad Use of Splunk at Cricket
Supporting Operations & Business Use Cases
IT Technical Operations
Messaging WAP
CRM Services Gateway
Monitoring
and Analytics Over the Air Video • Monitoring and analytics of
Activation (OTA) Optimization over 2 TB / per day
SOA
Monitoring • 100s of TBs of historical
and Analytics Authentication Policy data on disk
Platforms Platforms
MUVE Music
Provisioning
Service
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6. About MUVE Music
Strategic initiative for Cricket More than 600,000 subscribers
Drives customer growth & loyalty Over 70 million song downloads each month
More than 230 million song plays each month
Complimentary subscription
included with most smartphone More than 30 hours of music listening per subscriber per
plans month
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7. Key Splunk Drivers for MUVE
• In-depth visibility into service usage metrics
• Identify and address issues for a better customer
experience
• Content usage insight
• Assessing the business impact by device
• Evaluate performance improvements and
variations of software releases
• Analyze end-user metrics in different ways for
more efficient and effective content delivery
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8. MUVE Service – Understanding the Customer
User authenticates & Authentication Logs
receives an IP address
Correlate MDN and IP
Address
Activity Tracked by IP
- Searches Key to understanding
- Downloads individual customer
Search Logs
- Browsing Download Logs experience with service –
Application Logs insights for support, IT and
business
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9. MUVE Subscriber Dashboard & Forms
• Subscriber insight:
– Tying MDN to IP is key with Splunk
– Did they get on the network?
– Did they get access to desired
content?
– User perceived performance
• Business value
– Rapidly troubleshoot customer issues
– Complete customer activity view
including usage stats to isolate issues
– Proactively identify known problem
signatures before customer call-in
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10. MUVE Download Dashboard
• Real-time download metrics
– Devices downloading songs
– Devices unable to download
– # of tries to download songs
– Volume of data downloaded
– Average download speed
• Business value
– Device analytics, benchmarking
& comparison
– Operational planning and
rationalization
– Trending and threshold alarming
– Proactively monitor and fix
issues/Drill down
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11. MUVE Content Dashboard (Demo)
• Real-time content analytics
– Top 10 searches across customers
– Top song downloads
– Top artist downloads
– Top played songs
– Top artists searched for
• Business value
– Banner hit rates
– What do customers want
– Audit of customer transactions
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12. MUVE Service Delivery Dashboard
• Real-time service usage metrics
– % of cloud activities
– # of users authenticating
– # of concurrent users
– # of users activating
– Download times, by device, 3G
vs. WiFi
• Business value
– Monitoring overall service health
– Visibility for platform
optimization
– Capacity planning for growth
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13. Device Performance Benchmarking
• Analyzing Muve download client performance
– Average song download times (song download times)
– Average time for device to request queued song (song gap/request)
• No manual timing analysis in spreadsheets; order of
magnitude faster in Splunk!
Song 1 Song 2 Song 3
Download Download Download
Time (S) Time (S) Time (S)
Song 2 Song 3 Song 4
Gap/Request Gap/Request Gap/Request
Time (S) Time (S) Time (S)
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14. Splunk Roles – From Execs to Operations
Engineering
Customer
Executives Marketing Operations
Care
Vendor
Call tracing
User Acquisition Content / Subscriber Look-up / Search / Troubleshooting
Splunk Use
Dashboards Dashboards Troubleshooting Benchmarking
“Wow … where was this five years ago for our other services?” - Customer Care
“Great work! It’s really cool to see you guys respond to these issues so quickly.” - VP Ops
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15. Splunk Impact / Top Takeaways
Splunk usage has grown organically (200+ users)
More data = more benefit (grown from 200 GB to 1.5
TB per day)
Machine Data Requirements to Vendors
• There’s a gold mine in this data - tell the business what
it needs – now!!!!
• The business is now behind Splunk . . . Splunk is core to
several strategic projects
“We have given the business tremendous insight and visibility as the music service launched.
They are coming to us hourly with new requests. . . .and we are saying yes more than no
with Splunk.”
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