Streaming Live Experiences to Millions, with Confidence

Technology Category

Analytics & Modeling - Real Time Analytics
Application Infrastructure & Middleware - API Integration & Management

Applicable Industries

Telecommunications

Applicable Functions

Discrete Manufacturing
Quality Assurance

Use Cases

Predictive Quality Analytics
Real-Time Location System (RTLS)

Services

Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services

The Challenge

Seven.One Entertainment Group, a leading player in Germany's multi-channel entertainment industry, was facing a highly competitive market with rapidly changing viewer habits. Users were moving away from traditional TV and towards video-on-demand and interactive, second-screen experiences. The company needed to execute with the agility that only DevOps practices could provide. However, the lack of a single monitoring tool that provided visibility over the entire application and enabled engineers to trace requests across services was hindering their DevOps mindset. Each team used its own monitoring solution, so no tool provided visibility over the whole application or enabled engineers to trace requests across services. This lack of adequate monitoring also made it challenging for Seven.One Entertainment Group to deliver live interactive shows, which draw up to 10 million simultaneous viewers online.

About The Customer

Seven.One Entertainment Group is based in Unterfoehring, Germany and operates 15 television channels. The company creates, distributes, and markets entertainment content for its parent company, ProSiebenSat.1 Media SE. Seven.One Entertainment Group’s digital content is delivered through many channels, including websites, mobile apps, smart TV apps, and Hybrid Broadcast Broadband TV (HbbTV) apps. As one of Germany’s leading players in the arena of multi-channel entertainment, Seven.One Entertainment Group is tasked with growing online consumer engagement amid tumultuous market changes. Viewer habits are radically shifting, with users moving away from traditional “linear” TV and toward video-on-demand as their preferred means of consuming media.

The Solution

In 2020, Seven.One Entertainment Group turned to Datadog’s application performance monitoring (APM), real-user monitoring (RUM), and infrastructure monitoring. For the first time, teams now have 360-degree visibility. Datadog’s durability and its intuitive UI have helped its adoption, according to Pavlo. Datadog has also been particularly helpful both before and during live interactive shows. Even before these shows are broadcast, Seven.One Entertainment Group can now predict bottleneck points in its infrastructure, so it can make any necessary adjustments ahead of time. And during the shows, Datadog RUM provides live analysis, enabling support teams to verify good performance and address any unforeseen bottlenecks that appear.

Operational Impact

All Dev and Ops team members are actively using the platform.
Teams can now trace the entire user experience, allowing engineers to find and fix issues quickly.
Engineers no longer fear being on call for incident management.

Quantitative Benefit

78% Cost Reduction: Datadog APM and Continuous Profiler enabled the company to spot garbage collection inefficiencies faster than it could with its previous APM provider.