Gaining service visibility and control: a major government agency’s journey with Splunk ITSI
Case Study
A major government agency’s journey with Splunk ITSI
In today’s fast-moving digital environments, government agencies are under increasing pressure to deliver seamless, reliable services to citizens and internal stakeholders alike. That responsibility extends beyond just application uptime – it includes operational performance, stakeholder communication, and the ability to detect and resolve incidents before they cause real-world disruptions.
One of Australia’s largest state government agencies partnered with Avocado Consulting to meet exactly this challenge: implementing a modern, scalable service monitoring and incident response framework built on Splunk IT Service Intelligence (ITSI).
What Is Splunk ITSI?
Splunk ITSI is a premium analytics and observability platform designed to provide end-to-end visibility into service health, predict performance degradation, and drive intelligent automation in IT operations. It consolidates infrastructure, application, and business data into a centralised view, allowing IT teams to act faster and more confidently.
Key features include:
- Glass Table dashboards to visualise KPIs, service dependencies, and infrastructure layers in real time
- Service health scoring and alerting, based on thresholds defined by operational or business impact
- Notable event aggregation and correlation to reduce alert fatigue and isolate root causes faster
- Integration with incident management platforms, such as Splunk On-Call, to streamline response workflows
When implemented correctly, Splunk ITSI becomes the operational command centre- or ‘central nervous system’ of an organisation’s digital ecosystem. These features make Splunk ITSI a compelling solution for organisations looking to modernise their operations, enhance service reliability, and drive proactive IT management.
According to Splunk, ITSI customers have reported:
- Up to 90% reduction in Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR)
- 95% reduction in alert noise
- 45% reduction in total incidents by proactively identifying service degradation before it escalates.
Services:
- Project Management
- Technical Expertise and Delivery
- Business Analysis
- Architecture IT/Operations
Solutions
- Splunk IT Service Intelligence (ITSI)
- Splunk Core
- Splunk On-call
Sector
Government
”This engagement elevated the operational maturity of a major government department, laying the foundation for scaling Splunk ITSI to additional business services.
The Challenge: disconnected monitoring, limited insights
Before engaging Avocado, the agency relied on a fragmented set of dashboards and monitoring tools. These systems provided limited visibility and often failed to convey service health in a meaningful or actionable way.
The agency’s existing monitoring infrastructure was characterised by:
- Siloed tools: Multiple departments operated disparate monitoring systems, leading to inconsistent data and delayed incident detection.
- Limited visibility: Legacy dashboards lacked the ability to provide real-time, business-contextual insights into service health.
- Inefficient incident response: The absence of standardised alerting mechanisms hindered prompt resolution of critical issues.
These challenges underscored the necessity for a cohesive solution that could offer centralised visibility, proactive monitoring, and streamlined incident management.
As the agency’s digital footprint expanded across multiple departments and business units, operational complexity increased. Each team had its own practices and systems, which made it difficult to detect service issues early or respond in a coordinated way. The organisation required:
- A centralised, real-time view of system and service performance
- Role-specific dashboards to engage executives, analysts, and frontline responders
- A scalable, flexible platform to grow with expanding service monitoring needs
The Solution: An End-to-End Observability Platform
Avocado Consulting was engaged to design and implement a long-term solution. The engagement, which spanned several years and departments, involved:
- Deploying Splunk Core and ITSI across a wide array of systems and services
- Building custom Glass Tables showing key infrastructure, application, and business metrics
- Defining KPIs and service health thresholds aligned to real operational goals
- Integrating Splunk On-Call for automated, intelligent incident alerting including after-hours response
- Developing monthly service availability dashboards, used by Service Delivery Managers to identify trends and inform executive reporting
- Providing ongoing managed services support, including continuous enhancements and platform stewardship
This approach transformed the agency’s monitoring strategy from a fragmented reactive model to a cohesive, business-aligned observability practice.
Results That Matter
Following deployment, the agency reported measurable improvements across multiple areas:
- 1,195+ issues proactively detected and managed, reducing business disruption
- Real-time service visualisations helped reduce incident detection and response time significantly
- Standardised response processes improved collaboration across departments using Splunk On-Call automation
- Improved stakeholder engagement, including executive visibility into the link between IT performance and service delivery
- Historical trend analysis allowed operations teams to identify and address performance degradation before it caused outages
Most importantly, the platform enabled the agency to manage growing digital complexity with confidence and clarity – laying a solid foundation for future service scaling and cross-agency collaboration.
Why it worked: Avocado’s delivery model
This engagement was more than just a software implementation; it was a strategic shift. Avocado Consulting’s methodology emphasised:
- Alignment of IT metrics with business value
- Stakeholder-driven delivery, involving application SMEs, project managers, architects, and operations teams
- Scalable platform design, ensuring it could grow with evolving agency needs
As one of the largest Splunk ITSI deployments globally, this project is a strong example of what’s possible when technical expertise, stakeholder engagement, and modern observability practices come together.
Conclusion
Government agencies often face challenges around scale, silos, and mission-critical service delivery. This agency’s success shows what’s possible when those challenges are addressed head-on – with a unified observability solution and an experienced delivery partner. Splunk ITSI, implemented by Avocado Consulting, helped shift from fragmented tools to unified visibility, from reactive response to proactive assurance, and from raw data to actionable insights.
Through the strategic implementation of Splunk ITSI, Avocado Consulting helped the agency transition from fragmented tools to unified visibility, from reactive firefighting to proactive service assurance, and from siloed data to actionable insights.
