What is Apto Operate?

For companies using Splunk, ensuring the system’s optimal health, without burdening in-house teams with day-to-day operational tasks, can be challenging. This is where the idea of Apto Operate was born—shifting the focus from reactive troubleshooting to proactive platform management, while ensuring the overall health of the platform.

At its core, Operate utilises a custom application to monitor telemetry data, continuously checking the health of your Splunk infrastructure. By taking over the more routine, low-level tasks, Operate allows your engineers to focus on higher-value work, ensuring platform efficiency while reducing unnecessary workload. In essence, we define the operation of a platform by five key areas: platform management, data management, performance management, analytics management, and reporting.

1. Platform Management: Keeping the Foundation Solid

The first aspect of platform management revolves around ensuring the underlying infrastructure is both healthy and reliable. This involves maintaining up-to-date applications and forwarders.

• App Updates: These are crucial to ensure compatibility with enterprise software updates. For instance, if your Palo Alto firewall app in Splunk isn’t updated, you might miss out on critical new functionalities or improvements from the software upgrade.
• Forwarder Updates: These are components responsible for sending data into Splunk. Keeping forwards updated ensures enhanced functionality, reliability, and vital security patches. Yet, because these elements are not typically flagged by alerts, they can easily be overlooked. Operate actively monitors these areas to prevent potential gaps in performance.

2. Data Management: Safeguarding Your Data Pipeline

Data management is essential for ensuring that your system is not just receiving data but receiving the right data consistently and accurately.

• Healthy Source Types: Many companies focus on alerts for missing indexes but overlook missing or compromised source types. This could lead to gaps in the data and potential vulnerabilities.
• Parsing Errors: Sometimes source types are overwritten, causing parsing rules to fail, which could prevent data from being ingested correctly after software updates. We monitor for these issues to avoid undetected data loss.
• Licence Usage Monitoring: We also track storage and ingestion against licence usage, allowing for trend analysis to predict future needs. By identifying anomalies in data consumption, we help you avoid unforeseen spikes or drops, which could signal a deeper issue.

3. Performance Management: Ensuring Smooth Operations

For performance management, Operate looks at the wider behaviours of the environment. Ultimately, we look to avoid throttling, which can lead to security vulnerabilities.

• Skip Search Ratios and Search Delays: These are often caused by the same issue, however they don’t necessarily happen at the same time.
• Balanced Search Loads: With multiple search heads, many customers inadvertently overload one, such as an Enterprise Security (ES) or IT Service Intelligence (ITSI) search head, due to its higher capabilities. We monitor search load distribution to ensure reliability and improve performance across the system.
• Trend Analysis: Regular trend analysis helps predict and proactively resolve issues before they cause significant disruption. For example, we look at CPU or RAM usage on on-premise environments, as well as ingestion queue workloads, to identify potential bottlenecks.

4. Analytics Management: Validating and Refining Insights

When it comes to analytics, accurate notification and scheduling management is crucial. Operate focuses on refining the analytics management process by ensuring alerts are accurate and appropriately configured.

• Notification Accuracy: False positives and negatives are a frequent problem, often due to misconfigured alerts. By regularly reviewing and adjusting these settings, we ensure more accurate reporting.
• Scheduled Searches: Poorly scheduled searches can cause delays, spikes, or even crashes. Operate uses trend analysis to detect and prevent overlapping searches that might overwhelm the system.

5. Reporting: Closing the Loop with Accurate Data

Lastly, reporting is where all the insights and efforts converge. Operate validates dashboard health, ensuring the reports you rely on to make critical business decisions are based on accurate data.

• Dashboard Validation: If source type names change or macros malfunction, dashboards can fail, producing false readings. This could lead to gaps in data and misinformed decisions. Regular health checks of dashboards ensure that reporting remains trustworthy and reflects the true state of the platform.
• Trend Analysis: Operate conducts in-depth, quarterly trend analysis across data management and performance metrics to maintain a proactive stance, addressing issues before they can impact the platform’s health.

Conclusion

The idea behind Operate is simple but transformative—moving from a reactive approach to a proactive one. By ensuring that the platform, data, performance, analytics, and reporting are all managed efficiently, we help Splunk teams focus on high-value projects, while we handle the operational groundwork. This shift not only improves platform health but also optimises resource allocation, ensuring your business continues to thrive with a robust and well-managed Splunk infrastructure.