Playtech plc is a gambling software development company founded in 1999. It provides software to online casinos, online poker games, online betting on sports, bingo, scratch, mobile games, fixed-odds arcade online games as well as online live dealer and online poker rooms. It is listed at the London Stock Exchange, and is a component of the FTSE 250 Index.
Playtech needed to build a predictive monitoring and alerting system on time series data, for early detection of outages and security breaches. The existing Hewlett Packard Service Health Analyzer system was not accurate enough to provide early and reliable predictions. A distributed monitoring and anomaly detection system was what they wanted. It is difficult to monitor distributed systems as they discovered by analysing successful and unsuccessful monitoring projects. You must be able to identify non-obvious issues and find the most suitable solution for each task.
Playtech decided to build Yet Another Alert System using InfluxDB, Alerta, and Grafana. This system uses the frequency of economic processes to combine monitoring and alerting for key performance indicators (KPIs), and business indicators (BIs). This system goes beyond just monitoring and alerting to provide observability that allows for deeper analysis of the behavior and causes of systems, their relationships with other components and necessary actions.
