U.S. monitoring and analyses technology for Playtech

Online gambling group Playtech will have more insight into the business of its operator clients and their players following the introduction of monitoring and analysis technology from San Francisco-based open source platform InfluxData.

In a press statement this week, InfluxData reveals that the platform is built specifically for metrics, events and other time series data that empowers developers to build next-generation monitoring, analytics and IoT applications.

Playtech has deployed the technology for improved network observability for a deeper understanding of system behaviour and causes, relationships between system components, and needed actions of its distributed global gaming network.

“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 behaviour of users. Now we track and monitor our partners and their end users in real time, looking for behaviour changes and gathering important metrics from the data to prevent outages and malicious behaviour.”

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 behaviour 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.

The technology enables Playtech’s critical incident teams to fully monitor and pull information from all over the world 24×7 using InfluxData, and depending on the problem take the necessary action.

“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 alerting us about non-obvious behaviour.”

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