Lenovo Offers Frictionless E-Commerce Experience With Splunk Observability

Adaptability and flexibility are vital when running a global e-commerce business.

A US$50 billion multinational technology company providing smart devices for consumers and businesses in 180 markets around the world, Lenovo sells its complete product range both in-store and online. The company operates a successful global e-commerce platform that not only offers seamless shopping experiences, but also maintains full visibility into every process, staying ahead of potential threats that may affect daily transactions.

After using another monitoring platform for a few years, Lenovo decided to upgrade to a more flexible and adaptable solution that could customize observability across operations to better respond to changing consumer preferences in the evolving e-commerce landscape.

Since Lenovo had already been using the Splunk platform to improve IT operations and security for years, turning to Splunk for observability was a natural progression. The Lenovo team deployed Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring and Splunk Application Performance Monitoring (APM) to replace its existing platform, while Splunk’s powerful cloud monitoring and observability capabilities have helped accelerate Lenovo’s cloud migration initiative.

Real-time visibility accelerates troubleshooting and developer productivity

With Splunk Observability Cloud, the Lenovo team uses full-fidelity data and predictive analytics to monitor infrastructure performance at cloud scale. “What’s most lovely about Splunk is we benefit hugely from having centralized, customizable analytics dashboards that collate and analyze transactions in real time, ensuring that we respond to customers in a timely manner while spotting errors and latency at a glance,” says Ben Leong, director of operations for the online and eCommerce platform at Lenovo.

As a result, the average time it takes to recover from a system failure has now gone from 30 minutes to about five minutes. Faster troubleshooting means increased productivity for developers and lower revenue loss for the organization.

“The fast-performing and lightweight user interface is extremely convenient, too,” Leong adds. “Technical data is more readily understood when presented in a graphical form like Splunk’s Service Map. Our developers love the pictorial topology that clearly displays the relationship between different services created for a certain application, as they can now better collaborate with other development teams who are building services for the same application. Apart from the powerful visualization, another bonus is the seamless integration with Microsoft Teams for alerting purposes.”

Equally impressive are the heatmap visualizations of Lenovo’s entire infrastructure and traffic light status reporting, as well as the advanced host monitoring function, which allows the team to capture the real-time status of each server.

Ensuring continuous availability during a massive traffic surge

No dropped transactions, no performance hiccups, no delays and real-time visibility into every transaction — this was the vision that Lenovo set out to achieve with Splunk Observability Cloud. And Splunk delivered, even during the biggest shopping day of the year, Black Friday.

On Black Friday 2020, Lenovo offered a doorbuster deal on computer products and gave away a limited number of gaming products as incentive gifts. While Lenovo had expected a sudden surge in sales and web traffic, the spike turned out to be a staggering 300% higher than the same period in 2019. Thanks to Splunk Observability Cloud, Lenovo’s online shop maintained 100% uptime — with zero outages or digital crises — and delivered a flawless shopping experience despite the massive increase in traffic to its website and mobile app. During these peak times, the Splunk support team also stood by to provide Lenovo with 100% peace of mind.

A scalable analytics platform fueling sustainable growth

Today’s consumers expect digital interactions to work at all times. With visibility into its end-to-end stack through Splunk Observability Cloud, Lenovo works across its entire data landscape to quickly understand how its infrastructure behaves across different services, using predictive machine learning analytics to fix problems well before they hinder the end-user experience.

With web traffic growing steadily every year, Lenovo now has a solution that continues to meet their evolving needs. Splunk Observability Cloud scales analytics while generating real-time and predictive actionable insights, allowing Lenovo to tackle new business opportunities and exceed customers’ ever-evolving expectations.