UC Health partnered with Conducive’s Managed Splunk Program to stabilize and modernize its Splunk environment, improve search performance, and manage ingestion spikes while supporting critical healthcare operations, compliance, and 24/7 security monitoring.
UC Health, a leading regional healthcare network, operates an enterprise Splunk environment supporting critical healthcare operations, compliance mandates, and 24/7 security monitoring. Facing imminent hardware lifecycles, unclustered infrastructure vulnerabilities, search performance degradation, and unpredicted log ingestion spikes threatening its 750 GB/day license capacity, UC Health engaged Conducive Consulting through its Managed Splunk Program (MSP) to stabilize, optimize, and modernize its data analytics platform. The initiative eliminated massive amounts of ingestion noise through custom preprocessing scripts and log filtering,upgraded the platform to Splunk 10.4, resolved chronic data model and search failures, and architected and deployed a resilient multi-node Indexer Cluster. The engagement delivered complete ingest stability, enterprise high availability, and long-term infrastructure scalability without impacting clinical workflows or security operations.
UC Health faced compounding operational, capacity, and architectural challenges across its logging and security infrastructure:
unknowndirectories, and Linux automatic sourcetyping issues hindered data normalization for critical feeds (including Epic and Microsoft Security integrations).
Delivered continuously through the Managed Splunk Program, Conducive structured a four-phase modernization roadmap executed collaboratively alongside UC Health’s internal engineering team. The MSP model allowed for flexible, on-demand engineering hours to tackle these concurrent workstreams.
splunkforwarder system service permissions, debugged syslog-ng filtering rules, and resolved Linux automatic sourcetyping errors that misdirected EHR and system events._internal index, safeguarding against silent agent drop-offs.
By stripping non-essential informational text from high-frequency Windows Event Logs, optimizing DNS event ingestion, and deploying a tailored PowerShell preprocessing engine for Imprivata authentication feeds, UC Health curbed runaway log expansion. These actions safeguarded the organization against costly license tier overages, keeping daily operations comfortably below the 750 GB/day threshold.
Transitioning from four unclustered standalone indexers to a clustered indexer architecture transformed UC Health’s security data tier from a brittle environment into an enterprise-grade, highly resilient topology. Data replication and indexer discovery now provide seamless failover, ensuring that indexing and threat detection continue uninterrupted even during host failures or maintenance windows.
Resolving data model acceleration conflicts and eliminating skipped scheduled searches restored search head efficiency.Security analysts and operational teams gained faster search response times on mission-critical dashboards—including Palo Alto Threat Trend views and Microsoft Security modules—while maintaining feeding lines to ReliaQuest GreyMatter for coordinated SOC detection.
Leveraging the ongoing support of the Managed Splunk Program, the organization now operates on a modern, documented architecture built to scale alongside future clinical applications and expanding hospital networks.
