Challenge
A team at Peach focused on media owner solutions including CARIA®, ARPP.TV, Attribution, and CopyCentral in the United Kingdom, Ireland, and France, automates and optimizes communications between different parties in the advertising workflow – from buying TV and online video, to managing campaign schedules and rotation instructions, to analyzing and harmonizing viewership data. Peach’s mission is to simplify through automation and provide an ecosystem for all parties to connect and do business together, better.
However, the modern advertising landscape has gotten more complex, making Peach’s mission more difficult. “I think the industry as a whole suffers from a lot of fragmentation, especially in video advertising,” said Al Hepworth, Senior Director of Engineering, Peach. “There are a lot of different platforms, and they are connected and managed in different ways.”
Peach needed an enterprise IT platform that provided automation and optimization to handle the complexity, as well as full-stack observability over their entire multinational operation.
Solution
Peach’s previous platform was an open-source system that was difficult to configure and set up, which only added to the complexity. Peach also had to manually maintain, upgrade, and update a mission-critical piece of their operations constantly, a time-consuming and risky process.
Peach needed a better solution. After an extensive evaluation process, they found LogicMonitor.
LogicMonitor has given us the power of full-stack observability and the ease of a SaaS product. We’ve got a set of dashboards that are focused on specific products and tell us everything that we need to know.
Al Hepworth Senior Director of Engineering, Peach
Benefits
“Let’s put it this way,” said Al simply. “LogicMonitor’s fantastic user experience and extensive feature set are far superior to other monitoring solutions on the market.”
LogicMonitor gave Peach the full-stack observability they needed, enabling them to visualize and monitor their entire infrastructure in all of its complexity and broadness.
“LogicMonitor isn’t just keeping an eye on our infrastructure,” explained Al. Peach has extended LogicMonitor’s capabilities by using scripts that examine all-important operational characteristics of its environments, including detecting abnormal data situations within the databases and repositories.
“From a technical perspective, what I appreciate is the ability to use the API in LogicMonitor,” says Ilias Oko-Osi, Senior DevOps Specialist, Peach. “It allows us to scale our deployments quite easily, and also create data sources that can get information from a wide variety of places.”
“We are passionate about automation and infrastructure as code,” added Al. “The API enables us to create monitors as part of the development of non-functional stories to give us the necessary quantitative understanding of whether these previously hard to visualize features have been delivered successfully. We call this MDD or monitor-driven development.”
While LogicMonitor has extended Peach’s capabilities, all of their team members don’t have to be highly experienced to use it. There is a multi-stage training program to bring people up to speed. This frees up resources, allowing more experienced engineers to work on other more high-priority tasks.
“It’s not just the tech teams that are looking at LogicMonitor, it’s also our support teams,” noted Jack Stewart, Junior Software Engineer, Peach. “It’s quite easy for all roles to understand what is going on. The support teams don’t need to fully understand the technical aspects, but they’re able to report the information back to their clients.”
As a multinational media services company, Peach gets an enormous amount of inputs and data every second of every day. With LogicMonitor, they are able to separate signal from noise and do it quickly.
“It can be very complex and confusing to deal with an alert storm. You need to be able to tune out less important alerts quickly and easily so you can focus on those that are business-critical,” explained Jack. “LogicMonitor allows you to do that easily through the different alerting mechanisms and the management subsystem. It’s very comprehensive.”
LogicMonitor handles Peach’s monitoring requirements, enhances their data sourcing and deployments through the API, separates signal from noise in seconds, and empowers employees at all levels to do their best work by focusing on the most relevant work. Additionally, LogicMonitor also saves Peach time for more important work.
“Just by using LogicMonitor we save about three hours of maintenance and scheduled upgrades per week,” said Jack. “We don’t have to double-check all of our systems and carry out individual reviews. We don’t have to do all of the manual work that LogicMonitor offers.”
Peach no longer spends time on manual maintenance and scheduled upgrades. Instead, it takes advantage of LogicMonitor’s full-stack observability to visualize and simplify its complex operations and grow its organization.
“We’ve got a set of dashboards that are very focused on specific products and show us everything we need to know, they are our eyes and ears.” said Al. “What are the key metrics? What do we need to see? At what levels should alerts trigger? Where should the alerts be routed? And how do we bring it all together into a neat dashboard? That’s what LogicMonitor has given us the power to do.”
LogicMonitor’s fantastic user experience and extensive feature set are far superior to other monitoring solutions on the market.
Al Hepworth Senior Director of Engineering, Peach