Playtech plc is a gambling software development company founded in 1999. The company provides software for online casinos, online poker rooms, online bingo games, online sports betting, scratch games, mobile gaming, live dealer games and fixed-odds arcade games online. It is listed on the London Stock Exchange and is a constituent 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. Their existing Hewlett Packard Service Health Analyzer solution was not delivering accurate and early predictions. They wanted a monitoring and anomaly detection solution designed for distributed systems. Monitoring distributed systems, as they found by analyzing successful and not-so-successful monitoring projects, is not a trivial task. It involves non-obvious obstacles and picking the right solution for various monitoring tasks.

Playtech decided to build Yet Another Alert System using InfluxDB, Alerta, and Grafana. The system combines monitoring and alerting for business indicators (BIs) and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) using the regularity of economical processes. The system is taking them beyond monitoring to observability for a deeper understanding of system behavior and causes, relationships between system components, and needed action.

InfluxDays Presentation

Playtech presented at InfluxDays London 2019. In this talk, they provided an overview of their platform as well as how they’re using the InfluxDB platform. Aleksandr Tavgen demonstrated how they’re using InfluxDB 2.0, Flux, and the OpenTracingAPI to gain full observability.