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Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt uses InfluxDB to gain real-time AWS visibility, optimize DevOps monitoring, and gather KPIs.

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Headquartered in Boston, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH) is a nearly 200-year-old publishing company that has been “changing people’s lives by fostering passionate, curious learners.” The company primarily focuses on K-12 education, both learning materials and assessment materials, and publishes textbooks, instructional technology materials, assessments, reference works, and fiction and nonfiction for both young readers and adults. Some of its most famous books include Lord of the Rings, Tolkien’s works and Life of Pi.

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH) faced three business challenges: gaining real-time visibility into their AWS spend that covers several accounts across multiple business units and many developer teams, optimizing its DevOps monitoring, and gathering and tracking KPIs to measure the company’s online educational business.

Since all these challenges involve time series data, the HMH Bedrock Platform Technical Services team chose InfluxDB Enterprise. They take full advantage of InfluxDB Enterprise’s unique set of features — such as flexible retention policies and control over downsampling without sacrificing performance — and also deploy InfluxData’s metrics collection agent Telegraf, to optimize spend and performance and inform decision making.

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“I really feel that there’s going to be a lot of different ways that we’re able to use time series data in areas that we haven’t even thought of yet.”

Robert Allen, Director of Engineering, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt