Case Study: UCAS (UK higher-education application service) achieves higher availability and real-time operational visibility with Splunk Enterprise

UCAS Enhances Customer Service Through Improved Application Management

UCAS, the UK charity that manages more than 650,000 higher‑education applications a year, struggled with intense seasonal demand—peaking on A‑level results day—that exposed limitations in its ability to collect, search and correlate large volumes of machine‑generated data. Manual log access across servers made monitoring, reporting and rapid troubleshooting difficult, putting uptime, SLAs and customer experience at risk.

By deploying Splunk Enterprise (and Splunk on Splunk) UCAS centralized log collection and built about 15 real‑time dashboards for IT teams and executives, enabling faster root‑cause analysis, proactive performance testing and integrated security monitoring. The result was higher service availability at peak times, improved visibility and analytics for C‑level and support teams, reduced outage risk, better protection of personal data, and an improved experience for students and HEIs.

UCAS

Peter Raymond

Solution Architect, UCAS