Reports are also currently being generated for outside groups via Splunk software.Plains All American (PAA) Pipeline constructed the Cactus Pipeline, a new 310-mile, 20-inch crude oil pipeline from McCamey to Gardendale, Texas. The pipeline transports both sweet and sour crude oil from the Permian Basin to the PAA/Enterprise Products Partners Eagle Ford Joint Venture (Eagle Ford JV) Pipeline. Within the SCADA group, plans are underway to roll out Splunk Enterprise to additional industrial endpoints on its legacy systems to increase visibility, improve reliability and also implement Splunk Enterprise Security (ES) and Splunk IT Service Intelligence (ITSI).
PIPELINE SCADA COMPANIES SOFTWARE
The SCADA team now has other groups inquiring about Splunk software capabilities. If there is a security issue affecting multiple endpoints, Splunk Enterprise helps accomplish the security investigation in about one hour, down significantly from as many as 12 hours required in the past.
PIPELINE SCADA COMPANIES WINDOWS
In terms of security, Windows security, IDS and vulnerability scan logs are helpful in providing important visibility into vulnerabilities so that staff can proactively remedy them. The Splunk platform also has had a big impact on the bottom line as long as the SCADA system is performing, it is generating revenue. Other Splunk Enterprise alerts let staff know that there may be system stability problems, enabling rapid response and meeting availability requirements. By bringing data from the Schneider Electric OASyS DNA and other internal SCADA systems into Splunk Enterprise, the team has been able to create alerts and now has better visibility into the platforms that pipeline control operations use. SCADA staff members are able to analyze endpoint messaging, timeouts, leak detection and other essential functions, and also correlate the sensor data with SCADA systems for true operational visibility.īeyond application data, the company also collects infrastructure data. Since implementing Splunk Enterprise, the company has gained real-time visibility into the data collected from tens of thousands of field devices consisting of hundreds of thousands of endpoints inside the SCADA systems. We are very pleased with our investment and the capabilities of Splunk software.” The TCO of Splunk is approximately 400 percent less. We discovered that we could accomplish the same tasks as four different applications with a single instance of Splunk Enterprise. Our need to correlate data effectively would not have been met and the overall cost of deploying multiple solutions was much larger than we wanted to invest in. In the past, the company had encountered some system stability issues that made it challenging to monitor and enforce compliance with other pipeline safety regulations.Īccording to the company’s supervisor of SCADA infrastructure and cybersecurity, “While evaluating a number of possible solutions to help monitor our very complex environments, we found that in order to address our multiple needs, we would have to have three to four different applications. Moreover, the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA) expects high pipeline system availability, with any downtime tracked and accounted for appropriately. While the company could investigate and determine that something occurred on an endpoint, it was impossible to correlate it with other events, messages and sensor data being monitored and generated by the multiple SCADA systems. To get visibility into these devices, the company relied on a hodgepodge of in-house solutions and vendor-built tools with limited capability. These devices are anywhere from five to 20-years-old and communicate via 10 different protocols. The company manages and monitors tens of thousands of field devices responsible for endpoint messaging, timeouts, leak detection and other essential functions.