Playtech Deploys InfluxData to Power Predictive Monitoring and Alerting System for Distributed Global Gaming Network

By Mark Herring / Company, Press Releases
Nov 06, 2018

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact: Dan Spalding, InfluxData 408-960-9297 | [email protected] 

Global Gambling Technology Company Leverages InfluxDB for Visibility and Early Detection of System Outages, Network Anomalies and Security Breaches

SAN FRANCISCO – Nov. 6, 2018 – InfluxData, the modern Open Source Platform built specifically for metrics, events and other time series data that empowers developers to build next-generation monitoring, analytics and IoT applications, today announced that Playtech has deployed its InfluxDB Time Series Database for improved network observability for a deeper understanding of system behavior and causes, relationships between system components, and needed actions of its distributed global gaming network.

Playtech is the gambling industry’s leading technology company delivering business intelligence driven gambling software, services, content and platform technology across the industry’s most popular product verticals – including casinos, sports betting, virtual sports, bingo and poker. It is the pioneer of omni-channel gambling technology through its integrated platform technology, Playtech ONE, which delivers data-driven marketing expertise, single wallet functionality, CRM and responsible gambling solutions in one single platform across product verticals, retail and online. The company has approximately 5,800 employees in 17 global offices, with more than $1B in revenues.

“Due to the high complexity and the huge amounts of adjustable settings of our system, we decided to build it as a set of microservices which allows us to define the responsibilities of each component, perform distributed deployments, and monitor all this activity with InfluxDB,” said Aleksandr Tavgen, technical architect at Playtech. “Before InfluxData we didn’t have insight into non-obvious behavior of users. Now we track and monitor our partners and their end users in real time, looking for behavior changes and gathering important metrics from the data to prevent outages and malicious behavior.”

Playtech’s previous solution did not meet all of the team’s needs and they were looking for even more precise early performance predictions than previous solutions were capable of delivering for their production gambling system across more than 50 sites, with many brands located in different parts of the world. Each location uses many products, services, configurations, mixes of configurations and backends. Even minor errors or oversights in a configuration file or certificates problems could significantly disrupt services.

Using InfluxData, Alerta, and Grafana, Playtech’s new system combines monitoring and alerting of time series data for business indicators and key performance indicators. The system delivers beyond monitoring with observability for a deeper understanding of system behavior and causes, relationships between system components, and needed action up to 15 minutes faster than the previous system. Early detection of malicious attacks and outages has proved critical to Playtech’s business, since it now detects any attempted security attacks to guess passwords or usernames, as well as service-start problems with earlier visibility into activities which may cause performance to degrade.

“Now we have the needed visibility into our platform connections and global customer activities to understand system behavior to predict possible outages and problems in the very early stages,” said Tavgen. “We can check on all problems, such as third party integrations that are broken, not just security alerts and threats, and the teams can escalate these issues quickly. InfluxData is widely adopted by the community, and it is fast and reliable, and comes with great support.”

InfluxData was chosen to work with Playtech’s machine learning systems to improve visibility issues, and has since been widely adopted by Playtech’s community across the globe. Now critical incident teams fully monitor and pull information from all over the world 24x7 using InfluxData, and depending on the problem they can take action. Playtech’s operations also involve financial transactions in highly regulated markets which demand high-level monitoring of their distributed systems for analyzing financial data, and keeping the information secure.

“Currently we have plans to create business intelligence in real time to share with our 5,000 customers licensing our technology, using InfluxData to extend the service out to them,” said Tavgen. “The information InfluxData gives us is very helpful, particularly at monitoring and altering us about non-obvious behavior.”

Metrics, events, and other time-based data are being generated at an exponential rate, as there is a growing requirement for analyzing today’s complex environments. The InfluxData Platform provides a comprehensive set of tools and services to accumulate metrics and events data, analyze the data, and act on the data via powerful visualizations and notifications. Its InfluxDB database is the overwhelming leader among Time Series Database management systems, according to DB-Engines' latest results published earlier this quarter.

InfluxData has rapidly built its developer and customer base across industries – including manufacturing, financial services, energy, and telecommunications – by delivering the fastest growing Open Source Platform that enables customers to derive better business insights, data-driven real-time actions, and a consolidated single view of their entire infrastructure – from applications to microservices, and from systems to sensors. More than 450 customers, including Cisco Systems, Coupa Software, IBM, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Nordstrom, and Tesla, have selected InfluxData as their modern data platform for metrics and events. InfluxData is pioneering the shift to time series in a modern metrics and events platform, and is making it possible for customers to become data-driven and take on digital transformation initiatives.

About InfluxData InfluxData, the creator of InfluxDB, delivers a modern Open Source Platform built from the ground up for analyzing metrics and events (time series data) for DevOps and IoT applications. Whether the data comes from humans, sensors, or machines, InfluxData empowers developers to build next-generation monitoring, analytics, and IoT applications faster, easier, and to scale delivering real business value quickly. Based in San Francisco, InfluxData’s more than 450 customers include Cisco, eBay, IBM and Siemens. Visit https://www.influxdata.com/. Twitter: @influxdb.

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