Two seconds. Sometimes, that’s all it takes to make a difference in the competitive cruise line business where booking volume fuels profits and growth. Which is why Carnival Cruise Line, a division of Carnival Corp., spends a considerable amount of time monitoring network performance and resolving issues fast.

“If our home page loads in five seconds versus three seconds … fewer people make it to our payment page, which is huge for us,” said Ruel Waite (pictured), manager of delivery and support at Carnival. “Our operation is about monitoring what’s happening, it’s about resolving issues as quickly as possible, and it’s about communicating to our business.”

Waite visited the set of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Splunk.conf2017 event in Washington, D.C. and spoke with co-hosts Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and John Walls (@JohnWalls21). They discussed the ways that Carnival uses various Splunk tools to track operational performance and how it communicates insights across various business units. (* Disclosure below.)

Using Splunk to understand baseline behavior

Carnival relies on Splunk to manage application logs and track performance metrics from servers. The company leverages Splunk IT Service Intelligence, an analytics and AI monitoring solution, to understand the baseline behavior of its system. It also uses Splunk’s transactional tools to tie operational activity together across infrastructure layers.

Splunk has also developed a Machine Learning Toolkit that Carnival would like to employ as a way to further increase the likelihood of bookings. “That will allow us to model all of those different factors that go into when someone goes from home page to payment,” Waite said.

ITSI for Event Analytics has given Carnival’s information technology team insights that it shares across the enterprise. The level of visibility that tools like a dashboard can provide has broadened interest and understanding through different business units as IT correlates key metrics with organizational performance.

“One of the surprising things we found with Splunk is that our business users love Splunk as well,” Waite said. “All of a sudden, they want it more than you do.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Splunk .conf2017. (* Disclosure: Splunk Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Splunk nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE