BNP Paribas selects Splunk ahead of Logscape despite bigger price tag

Senior management, as well as developers, benefiting from platform that has replaced 10-year-old counter-party risk system

Financial services firm BNP Paribas has rolled out operational intelligence platform Splunk to a broad range of users including senior business managers.

The company was on the hunt for a new counter-party risk solution. It had in place a 10-year-old grid-based system but wanted to use the power of the grid on the compute side.

"The problem with the old system was that it was very batch oriented so you had to wait for everything to arrive, run a batch and then get the numbers at the end," Dave Fiveash, global market and counter-party risk support manager at BNP Paribas, told Computing.

Fiveash's division, Group Risk, also looks after a market risk system that Fiveash views as more of a strategic platform because it is event driven.

"You would get risk figures as feeds arrive, you didn't have to wait for everything to come in - so the idea was to combine the power of the event-driven side with the power of the grid," he says.

In order for the company to make the numbers available earlier, it needed a better product for its internal clients.

"We are a global bank with a global user base so if we can get the Asian figures to their staff earlier and the London staff their figures earlier then that would be a great benefit to all of us. Splunk came in when we realised the problems in supporting a grid-based party system," Fiveash says.

BNP Paribas' developers were aware of the Splunk platform, and wanted to use the technology to access all of their log files across a distributed platform. Previously developers had to access log files manually, which was time consuming.

"Our developers were also keen to provide a single trail through our system. So if a user is viewing a calculation or trying to simulate a ‘what if' scenario, we can trace it all the way through the front end, all the way through the calculation end and back out with a single transaction ID. Then we can pump this into Splunk and see their whole story through all of the applications and find out really what's going on, where and if we're losing time," Fiveash explains.

Splunk was chosen just over a year ago ahead of Logscape, but Fiveash suggests that it wasn't a straightforward choice.

"To be honest we weren't sure if Splunk would get chosen because it is a new product and it has a cost - which against its competitors was quite a bit higher. We were looking at Logscape as another option but we chose Splunk because we deemed that it was something everybody would be able to use and benefit from," he says.

The company had buy-in from everyone from developers up to senior management within Group Risk, which Fiveash says was because of the speed and ease of use of the product.

"We didn't want to just make it a developer's techie kind of tool. We even had senior managers looking in and trying to understand what the business users were doing.

"It starts as a distributed log view and you can get some nice graphs out of it. Senior management have used it and it has fired up their imagination - they've even got involved with designing certain dashboards because it's enabling them to look at how other internal clients are using it," says Fiveash.

This could lead to the business charging internal clients for the amount of load they put onto the system.

"There could be a case where we can start charging this back as a service, so it may not just be an expense but a way of getting revenue back into the business unit," Fiveash predicts.

He says that at the moment it would be difficult to quantify a monetary return on investment from the product, but adds that Splunk has allowed his division to channel its development efforts and have more meaningful discussions with the business.

Four years ago, prior to using Splunk, Fiveash explains, one of BNP Paribas' front-end systems had come under an extreme load and the firm tried to figure out why this had happened. It was a lengthy process, but it was discovered that it was another business group that had automated its system to hit the front end system.

"It wasn't just end users coming in [to the system], it was an automated system with one wrong piece of code inside it, so we were almost getting a DDoS effect on our own system. Now we can find out this kind of occurrence instantly and it's great," Fiveash explains.

BNP Paribas is now looking to integrate Splunk with other systems and databases.

"Splunk's visualisation layer is brilliant, it is better than most other things we have seen and better than some of the monitoring tools we use such as Nagios, which is better for pulling in metrics from many different places into one," Fiveash states.

He cites this as another key benefit of Splunk: that the platform can be integrated with many different technologies, and its use can also be extended with Splunk apps, most of which are free.

"Splunk is doing a good job of keeping ahead of the competition. [Other vendors] are trying to catch up but it will be a little while yet before they can," he says.