Sponsored Keynote - Fun and Games: Using Prometheus to aggregate disparate metric dat... Matvey Arye
Channel: CNCF [Cloud Native Computing Foundation]
Date: 21/05/2021

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Sponsored Keynote - Fun and Games: Using Prometheus to aggregate disparate metric data formats at a major gaming company - Matvey Arye, Timescale

In this session, you’ll learn how and why a major gaming company used Prometheus to simplify querying, dashboarding, and reporting on their load testing data, by aggregating disparate metric formats. You’ll learn about the challenge of centralizing monitoring data from disparate sources, why it's becoming increasingly common, and an example of how to overcome it by using Prometheus in an innovative way. You’ll also walk away with a nuanced understanding of the importance of flexibility in observability systems, as well as frameworks to advocate for more Prometheus adoption inside your organization.
We’ll focus on one story, but the problem of aggregating disparate metric sources is an all too common one. 
In this case, a major gaming company uses Prometheus to conduct load testing before releasing its games into production, so that every game runs reliably and performantly. Each online game is composed of many services, run by independent engineering teams. Given the mammoth scale of the company, it was not possible to standardize on one tool to monitor metrics. Each team used its favorite metrics monitoring tool, which includes all the usual suspects, like Prometheus, DataDog, Graphite, Zabbix, New Relic, StatsD, etc. 
 
This gave rise to an interesting technical challenge: how to efficiently centralize load testing metrics and monitoring data from disparate metrics sources into a consistent format and data store? 
The gaming company solved this problem by using Prometheus and Promscale -a versatile long-term store for observability - to centralize, store and analyze the disparate load testing metrics. The result is a simple, unified system that allows the team to run queries, deliver useful dashboards, and generate reports to analyze load test results in an on-demand and self-serve fashion.
We’ll also discuss some other dimensions of storage flexibility we believe are beneficial to support complex, hybrid environments, often found in the real world.