Date:

October 21, 2014

What is your name?

Brad Lhotsky

What is the name of your company?

Booking.com

What is your position or title?

Systems Security Team Lead

How long has your company/org/dept/team been using Graphite?

3 years

What do you use Graphite to monitor?

We use graphite as our primary system, network, and application performance metric store. We also track business analytics in Graphite. My team uses Graphite to monitor our security infrastructure and track security metrics including vulnerabilities, frequency of security scanners, and alerting levels.

What questions does Graphite help you answer?

Graphite metrics are used for everything from system and network performance investigations through to business intelligence.

What problems does Graphite help you solve?

Graphite has provided a simple API to empower developers, system administrators, network engineers, and security engineers a way to store time-series data. This means we can correlate data across all these disciplines to understand the full impact of code changes, network infrastructure changes, or security policies in near real time.

Do you track any business or non-technical metrics in Graphite?

We track both technical and business metrics in Graphite. It allows us to understand the business costs of outages or performance degradations easily. It also allows us to correlate business trends with system, network, and applicaiton level trends. This leads to more informed decision making by the technical people and confidence in the technical teams by the business folks.

Do you use Graphite for anything unique?

The scope of the business level monitoring we do with Graphite is significant. Most technical decisions are made only once business value is understood. Graphite provides a convenient way for technical and non-technical people to access both the technical and business data in an easy to understand way.