BBC Future Media Group Case Study

• Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Computing

• Business Operation

• System Integration

The BBC was facing a challenge with the changing landscape of broadcast technology. As more people started consuming news and entertainment online, the BBC needed to ensure they could deliver an exceptional customer experience through this medium. They had adopted continuous delivery and DevOps across their groups and transitioned significant infrastructure and services to public clouds. However, they were concerned about the risk of a degraded customer experience due to their chaotic and disparate monitoring approach. The BBC had a diverse infrastructure with many discrete monitoring tools in place, some of which were running on individual PCs that would frequently crash. The NOC team had to constantly monitor multiple dashboards in different applications, making it difficult to identify actionable events and respond quickly.

BBC Future Media Group is a part of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), a public service broadcaster in the United Kingdom. The group is responsible for the corporation's digital media, including its website and interactive television services. The BBC is one of the largest and most respected media organizations in the world, with a diverse range of services including television, radio, and online content. The Future Media Group is at the forefront of the BBC's digital transformation, responsible for delivering content to audiences through a variety of digital platforms. This includes on-demand platforms and streaming content such as BBC iPlayer, Doctor Who, elections coverage, and sporting events.

The BBC chose Zenoss, a software-defined IT operations platform, to solve their monitoring challenges. Zenoss provided a unified platform that streamlined monitoring and contributed to both customer satisfaction and operational efficiency. The platform also facilitated a smooth transition to the cloud, where the BBC moved approximately 50% of their infrastructure and services. Zenoss was chosen for its scalability, flexibility, and value for money. The platform was capable of monitoring 3,000 metrics per second and 20 events per second, making it suitable for the BBC's large-scale operations. The agentless architecture of Zenoss reduced the deployment burden, contributing to its scalability. The platform's flexibility allowed it to fit within the fast-paced DevOps workflows of each product group at the BBC. Zenoss also met the BBC's financial accountability requirements, providing a cost-effective solution with simple licensing.

• Improved, streamlined monitoring through a unified platform
• Smooth transition to the cloud, with approximately 50% of infrastructure and services moved
• Broad internal adoption among monitoring teams, product groups, operations teams and senior management

• Monitoring of approximately 1 million data points every five minutes across more than 5,000 devices