2. 2
About Pason
• Mission: “To provide technologies, information, and services that improve
the effectiveness, efficiency, and safety of drilling operations.”
• Over 30 years of experience transforming drilling data into information
that helps customers make smarter drilling decisions
• Industry-leading rental service provider of oilfield instrumentation and
data technologies for land-based drilling and service rigs
• Best-in-class service: locally based field technicians who live and work
close to major oil/gas basins and 24/7 technical support
• Headquartered in Calgary, Alberta, Canada with global presence
throughout North America, South America, Australia, Middle East, and
North Africa
3. 3
About Me
• Rigsite Software Manager (in R&D group)
• Joined Pason in 2001
• Using Splunk for over four years
• Managing 10-person team focused on 2 areas
• Rigsite Tier 3 Software Support
• Responsible for handling the most difficult rig site software problems
• Develop software tools for rig site support and analytics
• Workstation Project
• Responsible for desktop computers running Pason software at the rig site
• Manage desktop image and application software for easy setup
• Favorite Splunk T-shirt “Log, I am your father”
5. 5
Choosing Splunk
• Splunk was used in other parts of the company
• We needed a solution to deliver understandable
results quickly
• Splunk was an obvious choice
• We were able to use it right away because it was already in-house
• Splunk simplified the data delivery and analysis process
• Splunk helped us uncover false positives
• No need to look at any other vendors
• Splunk was already working for us in other areas of the business
• We expanded its capabilities as we went along
“Splunk gave us
everything we
needed. Instead of
manually going
through emails, we
were able to easily
see the data &
analyze it very
quickly.”
6. 6
Splunk Benefits
• Enables proactive fleet monitoring
• We see potential issues before the customer is impacted
• Alerts notify us right away when there is an issue
• Provides a high level of visibility with dashboards
• Business metrics, rig counts, product adoption
• Significantly reduces our troubleshooting time and
improves results
• We can tell if issues are confined to one rig or more
• Enhances our software deployments
• We can easily identify the status of our software trials
“Our ‘A-ha’ moment
was when we realized
Splunk would
immediately let us
know when there
was a potential
problem on a rig &
we could quickly
investigate.”
7. 7
Splunk at Pason
• 2.2 GHz, 16-core server, 128 GB RAM
– Manages all incoming data
• 20-40 daily users:
– IT
– R&D
– Support Services
– Operational Groups
• Architecture:
– 1 indexer
– 3 forwarders
3 Universal Forwarders
1 Indexer
1 Search Head + 1 Deployment Server
10. 10
Splunk for Monitoring / Troubleshooting
• Proactively monitor & troubleshoot our rigs
• We’ve improved our troubleshooting process & times
• We can determine if issues are occurring on one rig or many
• We’ve set up alerts so we are aware of any concerns
before our customers are impacted
• We started using dashboards for monitoring
• Added alerts for notification and immediate investigation
• We are able to quickly distinguish real issues from
false positives
“Splunk immediately
simplified things
immensely for us and
we were able to
uncover which rigs
had problems and
which were false
positives.”
14. 14
Splunk for Visibility / Analytics
• Support Services and Call Center dashboards
• Quick, primary view on the status of the rig
• Analytics – call response times, types of calls received
• Business and Operational dashboards
• Rig counts, product counts, installed equipment
• Product adoption, fleet-wide trends over time
• Proactive fleet monitoring dashboard
• Notifies the team of any issues we need to investigate
• Deploying new software
• Splunk helps us analyze the trial & resolve issues
“Our dashboards
provide vital
information to multiple
teams about the status
of our fleet of rigs,
installed equipment,
product counts and
more.”
17. 17
Splunking Ahead….
• Integrating more systems and getting more data
into Splunk to:
• Expand operational data correlation
• Increase proactive monitoring with information from the rigs
• Strive for 100% uptime
• Standardize Splunk development
• Broaden base of users authoring searches and dashboards
• Enable effective, reusable, and maintainable dashboards
• Development guidelines for dashboards, searches, & macros
• Allow for easier readability and understanding
• Simplify / unify saved searches and macro naming conventions
• Reusable code!
18. 18
Splunk Successes
• Versatility – Expand as we go
• High level data feeding into Splunk as well as data from numerous applications
and products within the company
• Automation - Saving us time and people power
• The right information is visible right away and we can quickly analyze it
• Eliminated false positives and simplified our data analysis process
• Empowers us to be proactive
• We know about and fix problems before the customer is impacted
18
Thank-you <name> and Splunk for asking me to present. I’m happy to be here and show you how we use Splunk at Pason.
I’ll talk a bit about what we did before Splunk and then how Splunk has helped us remove the barriers and make progress.
First let me tell you about Pason.
Tier 3 – explain a bit and how it fits into Support Services (Tier 1 and 2)
Expanded capabilities – what data is going into Splunk and how we use Splunk
Started within a team in R&D and then expanded into IT and more groups in R&D
A huge benefit of Splunk for our company is having dashboards which are used by the Support Services and the Operational Groups in the company
False positives – Splunk gives us the ability to analyze on the fleet or sets of rigs.
Example
- CPU usage on the server at the rig appeared to be higher then expected on a small number of rigs. Wasn’t impacting the customer but didn’t appear accurate
- By analyzing the data on the fleet and devices installed, was determined this was expected by what devices are running
EDR Tier 3 Fleet Monitoring dashboard gives us the ability to proactively monitor the fleet
Allows immediate focus on rigs needing further investigation
One of the panels is highlighting the load on the server, immediate investigate to determine the cause
WiMesh Analysis dashboard gives us the ability to easily highlight potential issues on the wireless network at the rig
Potential issue if the Signal To Noise ratio drops or the ping latency spikes
Dashboard used by our Tier 1 Support Services group.
Provides quick overview of the rig for when a customer calls into Support Services
Contractor and Operator for the well, rig location, list of previous calls, devices installed and what software versions running
Dashboards also provides a historical view on the key devices and wireless connections on the rig
Visibility we gain from Splunk helps other teams at Pason; we’ve created dashboards for:
The support services & customer call center teams
Left dashboard – Allows us to easily see the CPU usage metrics on the fleet based on the type of server and how many devices installed
Right dashboard – Allows quick overview for the Operational Groups to see where the rigs are located and what software version and server type is installed
Versatile Server Platform
Splunk has been very versatile for us, and we have been able to expand it as we go. We now have high level data feeding into it as well as data from numerous applications and products within the company, both on the server site and the rig site.
Splunk has done a great job at automating what was a manual process, and giving us much better results, much faster – saving us time and people power. When alerts used to come through email, it was extremely time consuming to search through the emails for the information we needed. With Splunk, the right information is visible right away and we can quickly analyze it.
We used to get a lot of false positives. Splunk has helped eliminate those and simplify our data analysis process so we can easily distinguish between a false positive and a real issue.
One of the best improvements for us is that we can now be proactive with issues. With Splunk, we know about and fix our problems before they impact the customer.