Zillow Group is getting a ton of traffic. As the housing market continues to grow, the company commands 63 percent market share for real estate websites and reached 166 million people in March.
But all that traffic means it has to understand what’s happening across all its websites, tracking downtime, investigating frequent errors and testing new projects, all in real time. Today, the company announced that it has chosen Splunk to provide that “operational intelligence” across Zillow brands.
Zillow engineers, IT operations managers and development teams will now be able to use Splunk’s machine language parsing abilities to quickly visualize what’s happening across sites. By intelligently querying logs, the service is able to quickly dig up and maintain data sets that may not have been initially stored for these kinds of visualizations.
Zillow had used Splunk before in various departments, but today’s announcement brings the Splunk Cloud service online across Zillow brands.
Previously, Zillow used a handful of open-source tools to meet the needs of different departments, according to Datanami. However, the patchwork of open-source tools didn’t scale as the company grew and departments had to work more closely.
By using a standardized, albeit proprietary, approach, Zillow can be more efficient in looking at machine data. The company just has to be wary about vendor lock-in, potentially risking a major operational headache down the line if Splunk’s vision and Zillow’s needs diverge.
