After profiling a supplier and its products, I find it really interesting to speak with on of their customers. I've spoken with the good folks from Splunk many times (see Splunk adding end-to-end visibility to IT's tool kit for a recent example.) Recently I communicated with Peter Ehlke, Principal Systems Engineer at Pegasus Solutions. Thanks, Peter for taking the time to answer my questions.
Pegasus empowers these organizations to accomplish the once-impossible feat of correlating room rates, inventories, payments and commissions for reservations systems, agents and hospitality chains. As a critical component in the travel and hospitality revenue engine, Pegasus demands peak performance and ultimate reliability to maintain customer satisfaction and service levels.
Due to the sheer volume, prior to Splunk, Pegasus could only manage 24 hours of transactions online and keep three days of back-up transactions on-premise. However, verifying historical guest activities such as a cancellation or confirmation are a common occurrence.
Any request for tracking a transaction older than three days required Pegasus to make an off-premise request to deliver the tape. Once on-site, Pegasus was faced with reviewing logs across 15 different systems to reconstruct and locate the request.
Peter Ehlke pointed out that "It used to take hours, even days to track transactions for some customers. Using Splunk, our support teams can typically respond to issues immediately, with real-time data and insight, while the customer is still on the phone!"
Other "discomforts" Pegasus experienced included access to log data directly on production systems, force-fitting homegrown logging formats into database-driven tools, and running customer reports in batches.
At the next level, the dashboard shows an average response time aggregated across all transaction types as well as the standard deviation, so they know if the whole system is sluggish or if it’s only a few outlier transactions.
They get a further breakdown through more scripted inputs that gather and display the execution time for each transaction type. Scripting that reaches deeper into the system for the number of transactions in the message queue provides early warning. If this number starts to rise, Pegasus knows a problem is brewing.
Pegasus also plans to use Splunk to offer proactive and immediate customer service. Rather than relying on scheduled reports, Pegasus plans to offer portlets where customers can view their data in real-time. So, if customers want to measure the impact of a promotion, they can see results immediately—and change offers dynamically based on a real-time analysis of results.