Case Study

Cox Automotive Utilizes Splunk Cloud During Data Center Closing

Customer: Cox Automotive

Industry: Professional Services

Business Pain: Cox Auto Incorporated (CAI) was closing one of their data centers, which housed Splunk deployment servers (DSs). These DSs had clients in other data centers and had to be maintained in some fashion. This was critical to maintain normal operation through the data center shutdown. The deployment servers weren’t accessible through any web UI and the clients were random, without any naming convention or other organizational strategy. CAI’s Splunk team didn’t have access to directly change some of deployment servers since they were owned by separate teams. It was a challenge to get a list of deployment clients, the deployment servers had to be searched through their consoles. The teams that own the deployment were slow to adopt changes and respond to questions. Firewall rule changes take an unreasonably long time to be approved.

How we fixed it:

The DSs in the closing datacenter were moved to the cloud and the clients of the old on-prem DSs were redirected to the new cloud instances. The process involved the leadership of each team that owned the DSs. The client lists had to be collected for the various teams to script changes to their deploymentclient.conf. The DSs are set up and there shouldn’t be any issues when the data center is shut down.

CAI should expect a smooth transition after shutting down this data center without any interruption in Splunk performance.