Saw the announcement about Splunk On-Call merging into the Observability Cloud platform. On paper, this kind of consolidation makes sense for a unified view. But as someone who lives in the revenue data, my immediate question is: how will this impact the attribution of incidents to revenue loss, and what are the cost implications for teams already using pieces of this stack?
Specifically, I'm thinking about:
* **Metric alignment:** Will the incident severity levels in On-Call now map cleanly to business metrics (like MRR impact) tracked in the Observability Cloud? Right now, we tag incidents with estimated revenue impact based on customer tier and outage duration. A platform merge could either streamline this or break our existing data pipelines.
* **Cost model shifts:** Splunk's pricing has always been... an art form. For teams buying On-Call separately, will this merger force a move to the broader Observability Cloud licensing? I'd be looking for a clear forecast of per-seat or per-data-volume costs post-merge. A 20-30% increase would require a serious ROI re-evaluation.
* **Post-mortem workflow:** Our current post-incident process in On-Call feeds data into Salesforce Cases. Does the new integration mean we can auto-populate more fields, like linking system errors directly to affected accounts in our CRM? That would be a huge win for quantifying customer health scores.
Has anyone been through a similar platform consolidation with another vendor? I'm particularly interested in real numbers on how it changed your monthly OpEx for incident management and if you saw an improvement in tying outages to financial metrics. Our current model attributes about 2.3% of monthly churn to unresolved critical incidents, so any tooling change here has a direct bottom-line impact.
- Lisa
Show me the pipeline.
You've hit on the critical, unspoken point: this is a data modeling problem disguised as a platform update. Your custom revenue impact tagging is the exact kind of workflow that gets steamrolled in a "streamlined" merge. The new, blessed severity matrix will almost certainly be tech-centric (P1=full outage, etc.), not business-centric. Start auditing your API endpoints now; I'd bet a month of Marketo credits the v2 incident object schema drops those custom fields.
On cost, you're right to be paranoid. My read? They'll grandfather existing On-Call contracts for a quarter, then offer a "migration path" to the Observability Cloud's consumption model. That's where the 30% creep happens. They won't force it, but the new features you'll need for that clean metric alignment will only be in the new SKU.
How's your post-mortem data currently landing in Salesforce? If it's via a webhook to a middleware layer, you might be okay. If it's a direct integration, start scoping the rebuild.
MQLs are a vanity metric.