Redfin required a powerful, enterprise-grade monitoring platform that provides the robust data scalability, granularity, and retention required for accurate, confident analysis and decision-making
Circonus, the monitoring and analytics platform built for the modern-day enterprise, announced that Redfin has selected Circonus to replace its existing metrics platform. Redfin, the technology-powered real estate brokerage, chose Circonus because of its ability to provide unlimited scalability and redundancy; more data frequency and granularity for better insights into services; and reliability for on-premises and cloud deployments.
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“As we experience significant growth in observability data, we require a more robust, advanced platform than a traditional monitoring tool – a solution that requires little effort from our team to manage, and gives us peace of mind that it’s always on, all the time. Circonus is a platform that meets these needs and gives total confidence in the accuracy of our data and the decisions we make based on it,” said Jason Burns, Senior Engineering Manager, Redfin.
Circonus, a metrics 2.0 compliant solution, is monitoring all of the core infrastructure and application data from Redfin’s website and mobile application. The Circonus Agent collects all StatsD telemetry, which then gets ingested into Circonus as OpenHistograms. OpenHistograms allow Redfin to generate aggregation analytics on-demand rather than requiring pre-aggregation, allowing teams to set and measure their own Service Level Objectives (SLOs) – a capability critical to Redfin as it implements more modern Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) principles.
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Prior to Circonus, Redfin’s telemetry pipeline was based on a combination of StatsD and Graphite, which was unable to scale with the increasing monitoring requirements of the rapidly growing company. It also required significant operating costs, lacked the ability to slice and dice metrics, could not dynamically calculate SLOs, and did not provide the metrics granularity and accuracy Redfin desired.
“We evaluated multiple monitoring platforms and ultimately selected Circonus because of its ability to collect, store, and analyze massive amounts of telemetry data at such high frequency and granularity,” said Richa Sehgal, Senior Software Engineer, Redfin. “This is exactly what we needed to ensure our data analysis is accurate. We also liked that Circonus integrates with our Grafana implementation for visualizations, and that it provides comprehensive visibility across both our private datacenter and also our infrastructure in AWS.”
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Redfin chose Circonus for its following benefits and capabilities:
- Reduced Costs: Over 90% of Redfin’s metric data will be represented in Circonus’ log linear OpenHistograms, which will allow Redfin to store highly granular data for years at very low cost, as well as reduce their metric footprint by 50-60%, thereby reducing network bandwidth.
- Accurate StatsD Sampling and Analysis: Circonus’ brokers and agents eliminate the needs for a StatsD server and can aggregate StatsD metrics on-demand at extremely high granularity, ensuring accurate real-time and historical analysis of StatsD metrics.
- Support for Tagging: The ability of Circonus to add tags to metrics will drastically improve the insight discovery process for Redfin. The additional context and metadata makes it easier to analyze across various dimensions and will simplify managing the millions of unique metrics that Redfin uses.
- Dynamic SLOs: Circonus collects all source data and stores latency measurements as OpenHistograms, enabling Redfin to dynamically compute aggregations from raw data. This flexibility simplifies defining and measuring optimal SLOs for existing and emerging business use-cases for Redfin.
- Data governance: Using Circonus as a centralized metrics platform gives Redfin a consistent metrics framework across teams and services to ensure everyone is looking at the same data.
- Improved data redundancy: Circonus operates with data replicated across multiple availability zones, stores multiple copies of data in a cluster of nodes, and ensures data retention in cases of network instability with its store and forward technology.
“We’re thrilled to help Redfin unlock more value from their data and effortlessly achieve the scale they need as they upgrade their monitoring capabilities and processes,” said Bob Moul, CEO, Circonus. “Telemetry is the future of business intelligence, but to unlock its value, you need the power to harness it, and no other solution can match the power of Circonus’ time-series database, which can ingest a virtually unlimited amount of high frequency data in real-time. Companies who leverage more advanced monitoring and analytics platforms like Circonus can gain better, more accurate insights that enable them to optimize operations, gain competitive advantage, and improve their customer experiences.”
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