Setting success metrics
Measurements provide statistics about key performance indicators (KPIs), and help you measure whether the best practices you adopt are having an effect on measurable goals. Good metrics provide transparency to you and your stakeholders.
Here are some guidelines to help you better measure success.
Develop a metrics dashboard
A metrics dashboard provides a way to show progress as you implement more best practices and optimize your Splunk implementation. A metrics dashboard enables you to quickly and proactively discover whether the best practices you put in place are having a measurable effect on the goals you set so you can adjust and pivot as needed.
A metrics dashboard will need to be customized to specific goals, Along with your own unique metrics of value, it can include an aggregation of relevant existing searches found across the Monitoring Console to measure user adoption, search volume, hardware utilization, and data ingestion.
View user activity in the Monitoring Console
The Monitoring Console dashboards provide statistical information to the Splunk platform administrators about all users with access to your Splunk Cloud Platform deployment, including their pageviews and apps. Use this dashboard to understand your users' activity and take the appropriate action to monitor their behavior. For more information, see Splunk Docs: Splunk Cloud Platform Monitoring Console or Splunk Enterprise Monitoring Console.
Interpret user detail results with the User Detail dashboard in the Monitoring Console
When interpreting your user detail results, note the following:
- Especially for new deployments, use the User Detail dashboard to monitor usage and determine if your users are adopting or rejecting the Splunk platform. A downward trend may indicate users need more training or that there are other issues that require investigation and resolution.
- Check if the values in the second row of panels (Search Count, Average Search Runtime, and Total Search Time) change significantly over time. Depending on the user's role and responsibilities, this may indicate behavior that needs further investigation.
- Analyze if the Searches by Type and Pageviews by App graphs reveal any patterns of behavior that could be optimized.
Enable Telemetry
Leverage the expertise of the Splunk Customer Success organization by enabling telemetry features on your Splunk deployment.
When you share telemetry data with Splunk, you also receive the following benefits:
- Improved product quality. By collecting accurate information about the topology decisions and deployment scale used by our customers, we can replicate those topology configurations and scale in our internal testing, helping us improve your product experience.
- Timely notification of known bugs, version incompatibilities, and configuration issues. When you share data about the product versions you have deployed, we can provide accurate messages and support to help you with bugs, upgrade tasks, version compatibility problems, and other configuration issues you might experience.
- Relevant feature enhancements. We prioritize what features to develop and enhance first based on the features customers use the most. By sharing your data, you influence these data-driven decisions in favor of the features you use at your organization.
More resources
- Splunk Docs: Share performance and usage data
- Product Tip: Creating efficient searches and dashboards for cost reduction
- Product Tip: Implementing search filters
- Splunk Outcome Path: Assessing capacity needs