Case Study: Cars.com achieves increased revenue and reduced costs with Splunk Enterprise

Splunk Helps Cars.com Drive Revenue Generation and Cost Reduction

Cars.com, a leading online vehicle-shopping site with about 12 million monthly visitors and more than 17,000 dealer partners, relied on fast, accurate site performance and usage data to drive revenue and advertiser value. The Application Management team faced fragmented, manual log collection and slow access to production data (up to 8 man-hours/week), making troubleshooting, bot detection and capacity planning — especially for high-traffic events like Super Bowl campaigns — time-consuming and error-prone.

Cars.com deployed Splunk Enterprise quickly to centralize and automate log collection, real-time dashboards and web-intelligence reporting; the platform now ingests more than 750 million queries monthly and serves ~100 developers across 13 teams. The implementation enabled removal of eight servers (about $160K capital saved), cut over 400 annual manual hours, delivered roughly $244.5K in quantifiable savings, and produced an overall ROI in the ~200%–400% range while improving site performance, troubleshooting speed and the customer experience.

Cars.com

Jon Abend

Manager of Technical Operations