Xandr uses Circonus data for predictive analytics and anomaly and fraud detection

Challenge

Xandr is a demand-side platform that conducts real-time, millisecond auctions for digital advertising. Any latency dramatically impacts the effectiveness of the service. Xandr was using a very fragile Graphite/Whisper deployment that could not handle the scale or performance requirements and provided no redundancy. It was incredibly painful and time-consuming to maintain.

Solution

Xandr was able to use Circonus as a seamless drop-in replacement for Graphite with integration to all the existing Grafana dashboards. Circonus is deployed directly in Xandr’s data centers as the volume of telemetry data is untenable to send over the public internet.

Results

• Xandr now uses Circonus to collect and analyze 250 million metrics every minute. This data is used for predictive analytics, anomaly detection, fraud detection, etc.
• Xandr was able to reduce its infrastructure from 104 nodes to 26 nodes and reduce its support staff from 2 FTEs to ¼ FTE, a 75%+ cost savings annually. Resources were redeployed to higher-value initiatives and the satisfaction of the DevOps team was greatly improved.
• The solution has been delivering exceptional performance at scale for over 3 years.