Case Study: Cricket Wireless achieves 15% fewer outages and $1.2M annual revenue protection with Splunk

Cricket Communications Turns to Splunk for Assuring Automated Service Management

Cricket Communications, a U.S. prepaid wireless provider serving over 5.4 million customers, faced scaling challenges as automated order-processing handled roughly 3,000 new subscriber requests per hour. Its complex mix of homegrown and third-party applications across virtualized and dedicated infrastructure generated terabytes of log data, but the operations team had little visibility into where failures or degradations originated, slowing troubleshooting and risking large-scale order-processing outages.

Cricket deployed Splunk (initial purchase in 2009, expanded in 2011) to index logs, build time charts and dashboards, monitor APIs and vendor systems, and feed proactive alerts into its event management system. The solution gave real-time and historical visibility used by 100+ users (including developers and QA), cut outage frequency ~15% (≈$1.2M annual revenue protection), saved one FTE (~$100k), and delivered over a 6x return on the $200k license cost while improving vendor management, BI insights, application quality, and customer experience.

Cricket Wireless

Clint Sharp

Director of Application Operations