An Introduction to the Splunk Success Framework

About the Success Framework Handbook

The Success Framework Handbook starts with best practices that establish strong fundamentals, then offers implementation best practices organized into four functional areas that support basic, intermediate, and advanced goals.

Most of the best practices in the Success Framework apply to both Splunk Cloud and on-premises Splunk Enterprise deployments. Where needed, topics specify whether something applies to only one or the other.

The best practices in the Splunk Success Framework include everything your organization needs to implement and maintain a thriving Splunk environment that focuses on what you want to do with your data. Whether you use Splunk Cloud, host Splunk Enterprise on premises, or have a hybrid of both, the Success Framework fits flexibly into any business model to support everything from ad-hoc searches to enterprise-wide solutions for organizations of all sizes.

The best practices in the Success Framework are modular. You can apply any practice any time according to your needs and priorities.

Fundamental best practices

Fundamental best practices are decisions, agreements, and success criteria that establish the purpose, goals, and ownership of your Splunk implementation. These tactical decisions provide clarity and accountability that are essential elements of a successful deployment. The Success Framework Handbook lays out four fundamental best practices:

• Determine the purpose and scope of your Splunk deployment. A purpose sets out the objectives of your Splunk implementation.

• Identify an executive sponsor. An executive sponsor is the leader accountable for the success of your Splunk implementation.

• Establish success measurements. Metrics set benchmarks so you can measure success as your Splunk implementation matures.

• Establish an operations framework. An operations framework defines how to set up your Splunk environment depending on your goals, and best practices for setting up a successful Splunk implementation team.

The fundamental best practices set expectations with stakeholders and ensure that your Splunk implementation stays on track and can grow and expand as your needs grow and expand. 

Success Framework functional areas

Best practices for implementing Splunk are organized into four functional areas:

• Platform Management. Platform management best practices support the availability, scalability, and maintainability of your Splunk deployment.
• Program Management. Program management best practices support how you conduct your Splunk implementation to drive adoption and realize maximum value from your Splunk deployment.
• Data Management. Data lifecycle best practices support efficient data management practices and generate effective use cases that are tightly aligned to data.
• People Management. User management best practices enable users and teams using learning incentives and role-based access to features and data.

Success Framework maturity levels

The Success Framework defines three maturity levels that apply to the functional best practices: standard, intermediate, and advanced. The maturity levels classify the best practices according to the level of effort needed to meet your priorities, needs and goals for each activity.

• Standard. Best practices that establish the basis for an optimally performing Splunk environment.
• Intermediate. Best practices that offer more control for results you can tailor to how you organize your Splunk implementation.
• Advanced. Best practices that suggest configurations and optimizations to grow and expand your Splunk implementation.

Maturity levels can grow with you.

For example, when you start out, you may have a moderate sized team and a few core use cases on established systems. You might benefit from putting some standard and intermediate-level best practices in place. If it's a priority, you could also apply a few advanced best practices in areas where you already have strong practices in place.

Success Framework terminology

The Splunk Success Framework uses the following terms:

• Splunk deployment. A Splunk deployment refers to Splunk software that has been installed and configured on a system and is accessible to at least one user and data source.
• Splunk environment. A Splunk environment refers to the equipment that hosts your Splunk software. For on-prem Splunk Enterprise deployments, this is the hardware, virtual machines, and operating systems upon which your Splunk software is deployed. For Splunk Cloud deployments, this is the service hosted by Splunk.
• Splunk implementation. A Splunk implementation refers to your Splunk deployment and Splunk environment (platform), the team of people that use and support Splunk software (people), the data and use cases you use Splunk software and solutions to address (data), and the processes your community of users follow to deploy, use, maintain, and grow an organization's use of Splunk software and solutions (program).

Where is the Splunk Center of Excellence (CoE)?

Splunk Success Framework is the new name for the Splunk Center of Excellence (CoE)! The Splunk Success Framework emphasizes best practices you can apply flexibly at any stage of implementation to realize the full benefits of Splunk software. The SSF best practices support an existing CoE model if you have one, but do not require that you build a CoE to experience the benefits of best practices.