Success Stories

The University of Fribourg attracts students and researchers from every part of Switzerland and all over the world, since its founding in 1889. More than 10,000 students in the Bachelor, Masters and PhD programs receive first-class personal support from over 800 professors, lecturers and research assistants. With a campus spread across the city of Fribourg, students and staff can stay connected through its Campus Management app. This software integrates applications that students use daily to see what’s on the menu at the dining hall, use an interactive map to find their way through campus, book a tennis court, check their grades and manage their university life.  When something goes wrong with Campus Management, both students and faculty experience disruption. If a student can’t register for classes and exams in a timely fashion, this inconvenience can even jeopardize their semester. To prevent this, the university’s IT and development teams needed more visibility into its applications to quickly resolve issues and create an optimal experience for students not just when they’re on the application — but also during their time at the university.

Campus Management is central to nearly every component of life at the University of Fribourg, offered through mobile and the web. Along with 15 fellow in-house staff members, Dylan Montandon develops and runs the application, comprising about 100 components. For example, a seemingly straightforward task such as scheduling an exam involves ten interconnected services within the app that must successfully communicate with each other. Digging into static logs to debug an issue was a tedious, hours-long effort that didn’t reliably yield answers. With the help of Digital Architects Zurich, a Splunk partner, the university was able to instrument its application stack and configure it to separate different applications. The University of Fribourg was already using Splunk Enterprise to monitor its environment but needed more visibility into application performance.

With Splunk, Montandon and his team can resolve performance issues before they reach users. When a service within the application stops working, Splunk Application Performance Monitoring (APM) gives detailed information so developers can fix the error in minutes, not hours — improving productivity and freeing up engineers’ time to work on other priorities. Besides resolving performance issues, the development team also uses the Splunk platform to improve code within the application’s database. Splunk technology also enables collaboration between new developers, architects and consultants, who previously struggled to understand how the application interacted with other services.

The next big step for the University of Fribourg is to configure alerting and self-service capabilities so that other IT staff can proactively check on and resolve performance. The organization also plans to unlock cross-department collaboration with Splunk; specifically, the infrastructure team is interested in monitoring the hardware portion of the university’s environment. Looking forward, the University of Fribourg is planning to manage all Splunk functionalities through a single tool.