Tom Gerhard,  Priceline | Splunk .conf2016
Channel: SiliconANGLE theCUBE
Date: 2016-09-27

01. Tom Gerhard, Priceline, Visits #theCUBE!. (00:19)
02. What Have You Seen At Priceline Over The Years. (00:39)
03. What Lead To You Becoming A Splunk Family Member. (01:38)
04. How Hard Was The Problem Of Growing As You Go. (02:52)
05. Was There Disruption Changing Platforms. (05:01)
06. What Products Are You Buying From Splunk. (06:30)
07. What Kind Of Intelligence Are You Looking For From Splunk. (06:50)
08. How Big Of A Deployment Are We Talking With Spunk. (08:10)
09. What Kind Of Headache Is It To Switch With Such A Massive Transformation. (09:15)
10. What Have You Learned From Splunk And How Has It Changed Priceline.com. (10:42)

Track List created with http://www.vinjavideo.com.
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Dot-com survivors adjust to the Big Data age | #splunkconf16
by Gabriel Pesek | Sep 27, 2016
For all of the attention garnered by fresh startups in the tech world, the companies that managed to survive the bursting of the dot-com bubble can have success stories that are just as dramatic, if not more so. And as some of these survivors are finding, to continue on in the modern tech world, they’ll need to take the risk of rebuilding themselves from bottom to top.

At this year’s Splunk.conf event, Tom Gerhard, VP of Performance Engineering at priceline.com (part of The Priceline Group), joined cohosts John Walls (@JohnWalls21) and John Furrier (@furrier), cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, to discuss some of the changes Priceline has made over the years, along with what its current goals for improvement are.

Rebuilding for opportunity

To start the discussion, Gerhard gave a brief history of Priceline’s online innovations, bringing him to the topic of the company’s decision to overhaul its data-monitoring systems for an upgrade, which led to its usage of Splunk’s utilities. “Our time to detect problems and time to repair weren’t quite where we wanted them,” Gerhard shared. “We wanted to go from good to great, and we thought we needed to up our game on the whole monitoring, alerting and analysis. We also felt like there was a lot of opportunity we were leaving on the table, looking at business transactions alongside of operational data.”

Looking back at the changes that had taken place at Priceline, Gerhard noted a wide degree of alterations within its operational sector. “Our technical stack today bears no resemblance to what we launched with; things have been changing and evolving over the years,” he said.

Higher outcomes

With these changes, Gerhard said, Priceline’s aims are fairly simple. “The outcome for any company should be revenue. And we think that by improving our time to detect problems, our time to repair when problems do occur, that we’ll be reducing outage time. … There is no acceptable down-time in our business,” he said.



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“But beyond that,” he continued, “we think we’re going to make life better for the people that are supporting our systems. When things go wrong, we should be able to get to the root cause faster and more pleasantly.”

And the improvements made to Priceline’s monitoring systems have effects reaching beyond its security levels. “We have a lot of inputs that are external, and all the way up to the customer experience on our website, and in between those two ends, there’s a lot going on. And the relationships aren’t always clear, because they’re complicated,” Gerhard noted.

“So we’re hoping we can use [Splunk’s tools] to surface some of that complexity and simplify it, and start to see rather than monitoring individual components that we can be monitoring our system as a whole,” he added. “I think that’s one of the things we’re also most looking forward to is not just getting better at the things we’ve already known about, but actually learning how to take it to another level.”