Anodot Blog

DevOps.com: Wix Achieves Full Monitoring and Visibility with Anodot

In a new article on DevOps.com, Chris Riley reviews how Internet leader Wix, leveraging machine learning for full visibility, monitors its complex DevOps environment with Anodot.

Leading website-builder solution Wix is serious about being proactive when monitoring their environment is concerned. With a team of over 300 developers rolling out more than 60 releases per day, Wix’s monitoring team wanted to harness global visibility for their entire environment.

According to Mark Sonis, Wix’s Monitoring Architect, “We use many monitoring tools. Something for server logs, something for APM, something for our application framework, and even internal tools. But they are static and only address specific needs.” However, the Wix team wanted to have a central place for all metrics and all systems, taking advantage of machine learning and correlations across systems to get full visibility.

According to the DevOps.com article, there are a lot of monitoring tools and each team may adopt a tool that is right for their portion of the delivery chain. For example, DevOps teams monitor server activity, and developer teams monitor the Application Portfolio Management (APM). The ability to look at that 360-degree panorama is a blind spot for many companies.

The challenge is exponentially intensified because tracking data across metrics pools can be a manual process. “It is not scalable to create manual alerts, thresholds, and metrics in all the disparate systems,” says Sonis.

That’s when Wix discovered Anodot. Anodot uses patented algorithms to deliver insights from real-time data while monitoring and detecting anomalies. The turnkey platform preemptively makes diagnoses and instant recommendations that allow DevOps teams to address issues before they become problems.

In the article, Sonis explains that there is a big difference between a technology like Anodot and traditional Business Intelligence. “We rely heavily on BI to determine application functionality. And data is coming from everywhere in real-time. Our analysts need to review and respond immediately and cannot sift through data from each system,” as he described it.

Adoption was faster than the monitoring team at Wix initially expected. “We just published it as a service and provided all data from every application version, every server, etc.,” Sonis explained. “Once we did that, backend developers started using it themselves via Slack. All the alerts go into a channel, and the best part is they set it up themselves. Additionally, because the channel also has a Git integration, they can see if a new commit impacted an alert right away.”

DevOps.com’s Riley concludes that with a tool like Anodot, it is not necessary to maintain a large DevOps monitoring team. “If an organization leads with the high-level visibility concept, they will have the data they need from day one, without manually rallying all sources,” he concludes.

case study, Devops

About the author
Rebecca Herson

Rebecca Herson

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