HBO monitors streaming media to optimize viewing experiences with the help of Circonus

Challenge

HBO was using AppDynamics for monitoring which had difficulty scaling and provided inadequate visibility and analytics. They were “flying blind.” Circonus was originally engaged to monitor the infrastructure for Game of Thrones but quickly expanded into all of the HBO platforms – now consolidated into HBO Max.

Solution

HBO replaced AppDynamics and its Graphite implementation with Circonus in 2014 and Circonus is now the system of record for all HBO monitoring. Using Circonus, HBO can track number of concurrent viewers, stream quality, player errors, stream drops, status of player interface (HTTP) in addition to traditional infrastructure metrics across all of its platforms and programs.

Results

• HBO has comprehensive, end-to-end visibility and instant alerting to ensure the highest possible quality of service. Can avoid or quickly resolve issues related to latency, buffering, jitter etc.
• HBO is able to retain years of season-over-season performance data to enable accurate capacity planning, control cloud costs, and proactively handle spikes in user demand with auto-scaling.
• Circonus smoothly scaled to handle 2X growth in 2020 and HBO plans regional expansion into South America and Europe in 2021.