Picture perfect analytics

With the evolution of the media landscape as well as viewing habits, the All 4 DevOps team must provide continuous visibility into the production quality of their on-demand service, as well as all supporting services, to ensure that their massive 18 million active viewer-base has a positive and uninterrupted playback experience. As an entirely cloud-based infrastructure, all of Channel 4’s services, from business to data stores to message queues, are hosted entirely in Amazon Web Services (AWS), and span web and mobile iOS and Android applications. In addition to production, the team is also responsible for distributing content via Content Delivery Networks (CDNs), which equates to petabytes of structured data passing through an API gateway.

“We knew we needed to improve on the way we were observing all of the data being emitted from our services and applications if we wanted to continue to scale our business to not only remain competitive in the media landscape, but also anticipate and deliver on the future needs of our viewers,” said Dan Jackson, senior solutions architect, Channel 4. “We started evaluating a number of machine data solutions, and ultimately landed with Sumo Logic because of the combination of operational logs and metrics intelligence available in a unified platform, which we saw as a real benefit for helping us achieve our technology and business goals.”

Using the Sumo Logic platform, Jackson and his team have been able to create a logging schema that automatically ingests structured log data from the All 4 mobile, web and big screen applications. Once ingested into Sumo Logic, the DevOps team can derive information about error volume, as well as individual user experiences and business impact, and then determine whether or not those errors can be remediated.

“Improving the reliability of our customer's playback experience was crucial, and in order to track our progress toward achieving that goal, we needed first to be able to observe it,” said Jackson. “Sumo Logic has been instrumental for being able to monitor the overall playback experience, troubleshoot and resolve issues immediately to prevent any disruption to our services. We definitely see ourselves growing with Sumo Logic to take advantage of the available metadata and dashboard capabilities to measure our performance against the broader company business objectives, as well as correlate all of the technologies and services running across our full application stack. We look forward to exploring future operational, business and security possibilities with the Sumo Logic platform.”

“Today, every business is a digital business and that means there is mounting pressure to embrace modern technologies in order to provide new experiences at cloud scale and remain competitively relevant,” said Dean Thomas, vice president of customer success, Sumo Logic. This coupled with the shift in how users are consuming on-demand media is why Channel 4 selected Sumo Logic as its machine data analytics platform provider, and trusted partner, to deliver valuable unified operational and business insights that empower their business.”