JDS drives increased visibility on Transurban roads

Melbourne-based IT service provider, JDS is driving a three-year project with Transurban for increased visibility on Australian roads through the usage of Splunk technology.

The solution stack features Splunk IT Service Intelligence (ITSI), taking data from various sources, including Vcenter, virtual machines, physical servers (Windows and Linux), network switches and Dell iDRAC using universal forwarders, technical add-ons and apps. All of this information is distilled, filtered through with AIOps (artificial intelligence for IT operations) and then presented through a dashboard.

JDS was brought into the fold in January 2022 for a three-year plan with Transurban setting out to establish enterprise-wide optics for transport system road assets across Queensland, NSW and Victoria, that is set to conclude in June this year. With the old set up, JDS claimed there was a general lack of visibility; while monitoring may have been possible, features like custom search and visualisation for data analytics was only possible with the Splunk-based solution. There was also an absence of efficient alerting and incident management workflows, which created operational challenges.

ARN understands that by using Splunk agents, data onboarded is able to be centrally managed. Additionally, once patterns are defined and key data is identified, future projects using similar data sources can be quickly onboarded.

During the project, a legacy system was used in parallel with the Splunk-based solution. Now, all data is captured by Splunk add-ons or directly from Splunk universal forwarders. Specifically, in Queensland, data is captured for select major roads and tunnels, while in NSW it is collected for the company’s tolling system.

“With Splunk ITSI, JDS have empowered Transurban to revolutionise their operations, setting them on the path to establishing global visibility,” said Brian Grant, general manager for JDS’ Splunk practice. “The success of this implementation underscores our commitment to delivering cutting-edge solutions for observability and resilience.”

The new system’s usage of AIOps played a “pivotal” role in minimising outages, JDS claimed, as well as reducing mean time to resolution “significantly”. Additionally, alerting capabilities were used in order to provide notifications of potential issues. This, in addition to enhanced incident management from ServiceNow, offers a “seamless workflow for incident resolution”.

In December, JDS announced it had managed and supported shipping and logistics firm SeaRoad with the deployment of a full-stack observability platform from Cisco.