Universities and Colleges Admissions Service (UCAS),U.K., the organisation responsible for managing university and college applications, will incorporate Splunk to help release A-level results on August 14th. Splunk provides operational intelligence software that monitors, reports and analyzes real-time machine data.

Enterprise IT architect at UCAS, Peter Raymond, says that the work of the Joint Operations Centre (JOC) at results time benefits from an operational intelligence capability vouchsafed by machine data indexer Splunk. The organisation began using the technology in July 2013. “It was a big success for us in how we could visualise user experience response times and the sheer volume of transactions,” reveals Raymond.

UCAS utilizes Splunk Enterprise across 40 servers and about 70 log sources, all of which are deployed through Amazon Web Services, and everything is forwarded to a Splunk server for indexing. Through indexing, searching, alerting and reporting on machine data from sources across UCAS’s IT infrastructure, Splunk gives the IT team a series of visualisations of their system performance, key operational metrics (broken down by the Higher Education Institution), their usage, the queries they are running and how the various applications are functioning.
Raymond says: “The Splunk logs give us both a view of the customer experience and also operationally for us. For example, there is one integration between Azure and AWS and we monitor that integration point with Splunk.”

Around the same time last year the Track system recorded more than 180 logins per second. It is hosted on the Microsoft Azure cloud service, while AWS supports more than 350 higher education providers.

Instead of an error being concealed in a log file, automatic notifications are provided to flag the flaw.

Read more here.
(Image credit: UCAS)

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