iQ Media (Kinetiq) allows brands to track any paid and earned media occurrence across local, national and global TV markets, connecting media investments to desired audience outcomes. You can search live and historical TV programming for every spoken mention or logo appearance of your brand and your competitors across TV, sponsored events and PR initiatives.
What were your team’s devops challenges and pain points prior to using Sematext?
Initially, with only several clients using our platform, we monitored our production environment via emails and text messages. They were sent by the core processes hosted on multiple servers across multiple datacenters, and triggered by custom scripts checking data states in our control tables.
Once we received an error email it was a matter of accessing the process location and sifting through the process logs to determine the error and then correcting it. This was a labor intensive process which does not scale well when the number of processes grows.
What were your requirements and considerations for monitoring and / or logging solutions?
We needed a hosted solution for logs outside of our production environment. It would function as an external witness to all our processes across multiple datacenters. We also needed a cost effective solution with the solid support so there was no need to invest time and resources within our organization.
What made you choose Sematext?
We encountered Sematext team three years ago at the Apache Solr conference and we were intrigued by their value proposition. Using Sematext services, we could leverage a hosted platform that captured, stored, and provided search capabilities. It enabled us to have access to logs from all of our processes across multiple datacenters using a single interface.
Moreover, we were attracted to the ability to set alerts based on events in our logs and to perform detail root cause analysis, ramping up the volume of logs which gave us flexibility when we rolled out new processes. We could get debug level logs (high volume) at the nascent stage and cut down to just errors and warnings in the mature stage of a process in production.
What problems did our monitoring and logging solution solve for you?
We run numerous Solr search engines in our environment and the Sematext plugin for monitoring Solr has made it easy to troubleshoot, scale, and maintain them. Additionally, all of our process logging is centralized and we can manage the alerts in a coordinated manner. We gained valuable insight into usage of our processes in addition to precisely knowing the location of processes without going to a manually maintained map.
Please share some insight into your implementation process and transition to Sematext.
We had to normalize our log levels, error codes and fields across all of our processes. We started with shipping logs to a central point and then uploading the logs to Sematext. As we modified and upgraded our process modules, we have since incorporated a direct upload of the logs to Sematext from each individual process.
What was the outcome and which product feature(s) do you find most helpful?
Single, time synchronized portal to search and look at log events.
Reliable notifications on events and event recovery.