·Sevion Xia
Reallysec Empowers Siemens Digital Industries, Leading the Intelligent Future
With visualisation and analytics in place, Siemens DI gained full-path visibility into product master data flows, plus anomaly self-healing.
Key Challenges
As the volume of data exchanged between business applications and processes continued to grow, Siemens Digital Industries encountered data latency and insufficient visibility within its complex and massive system architecture, particularly affecting SAP product master data synchronization and adversely impacting business users.
Key Outcomes
By introducing an observability platform powered by Splunk Cloud, combined with Confluent Kafka and SnapLogic Splunk add-ons provided by Rojo Consultancy, Siemens DI significantly reduced data latency while substantially lowering operational costs, improving efficiency and system scalability, and markedly enhancing customer satisfaction.
Siemens Digital Industries Streams into the Future
Seamlessly connecting the physical and digital worlds requires fast, accurate data processing.
As a subsidiary of Siemens AG, Siemens DI is a market leader in industrial automation and industrial software, with solutions underpinning many critical aspects of modern life — from automotive manufacturing and food distribution to pharmaceuticals, home appliances, and telecommunications equipment. Over 170,000 customers worldwide rely on Siemens DI's software to make data-driven decisions and manage massive volumes of data in industrial IoT environments.
To achieve comprehensive data monitoring and metric insights, Siemens DI adopted Splunk along with integration applications provided by Rojo to track key performance indicators (KPIs) in real time:
- Including data consumption rates per second, consumption frequency, and platform health status across business systems;
- Extending to business KPIs supporting global sales office locations.
This platform-based observability framework became the cornerstone of Siemens DI's data visualization transformation.
Results at a Glance
- Enhanced data transparency for customers across 75+ countries and 120+ SAP systems
- Compressed synchronization time for tens of millions of product and pricing items from weeks to real-time
- Improved product reliability and customer satisfaction
Unprecedented Data Transparency
Siemens DI's Product Master Data Streaming (PMDS) service enables customers to process and consume master data for use in other systems. However, Siemens DI previously lacked visibility into these data streams, making error identification difficult. Issues could originate from SAP systems or integration vendors, yet service requests ultimately landed with Siemens DI for troubleshooting.
We initially used Splunk Enterprise to monitor integration pipelines and event-driven platforms, logging metadata across more than twenty fields to build analytics dashboards. Splunk brought unprecedented transparency. — Afonso Rodrigues, Citizen Integration Engineer for PMDS, Siemens DI
Thanks to the add-ons provided by Rojo Consultancy, the Splunk platform seamlessly integrated with SnapLogic and Kafka, enabling Siemens DI to monitor multiple critical applications across its complex systems through a single pane of glass.
Errors in ETL processes are difficult to trace back to their source, but Splunk enables both us and our customers to quickly pinpoint issues and accelerate resolution. — Thomas Hecht, IT Project Lead for Product Master Data, Siemens DI
Solutions and Products
- Solutions: Observability, IT Monitoring
- Products: Splunk Cloud Platform, Platform-UI
Rapid Response to Performance Issues
For enterprises that rely on ETL tools to automate data processing, the accuracy and timeliness of data streams are critical. The challenge Siemens faced was that massive data volumes undergoing multiple transformations across numerous systems are highly prone to issues.
When errors occur, it's difficult to determine which application or data source they originate from. Splunk helps us and our customers quickly identify problems and accelerate response times. — Thomas Hecht
At the same time, Siemens DI leverages Splunk's insight capabilities to proactively monitor performance, detecting and alerting on issues before they impact customers, ensuring continuous compliance with service level agreements (SLAs).
Unlocking Innovation Beyond IT
Splunk not only gives IT teams visibility into data but also empowers business teams to gain deeper insights and proactively address data issues, avoiding costly delays.
Next, we plan to analyze the data content itself, empowering business users rather than just IT professionals. Splunk enables business teams to run any type of analytical task, helping our business partners create even more value. — Hecht
With Splunk and Rojo, Siemens DI even enables users to "one-click reprocess" failed tasks and implement a consumption-based pricing model.
We can not only build integration workflows for customers but also demonstrate the higher-value scenarios that Splunk delivers. — Hecht