LiveU Accelerates Innovation and Troubleshooting with Modern Observability from Logz.io

About LiveU

Fifteen years ago, satellite news trucks were a common sight. Today, it’s far more likely that LiveU delivered the footage in the broadcast you just watched. The organization’s broad portfolio of end-to-end live video solutions includes several cloud-based platforms that have transformed high-quality video management, transmission and IP distribution.

“Logz.io has become a critical part of understanding exactly what’s happening at any given time with our infrastructure.” Chris Perry Senior Director of Product Management at LiveU

As Cloud Complexity Grows Analysis and MTTR Slows

Ensuring the organization’s entire cloud-based technology stack is healthy and optimized for top performance is non-negotiable. As Chris Perry, Senior Director of Product Management at LiveU, shared, “Our journey into cloud platforms, like everyone else’s, is an evolving thing. Monitoring and observability are crucial because, without it, we don’t know that things are working properly.” 

Juggling multiple tools to meet that need, however, previously meant manually hunting down data, which is not only inefficient, it often lacked the necessary information needed to diagnose issues accurately. Since reliability is a cornerstone of LiveU’s offerings, when the team began clustering their Java applications, they introduced the Logz.io Cloud-Native Observability Platform into their environment. The new tool brought much-needed visibility and context into the errors resulting from interactions between the nodes.

Reaching New Levels of Observability with Logz.io

Ultimately, Logz.io provided the LiveU team with the capability to accelerate analysis and reduce MTTR when troubleshooting its Java application clusters.

However, that was only the beginning. “After getting Logz.io, we immediately saw the value of having this data in our hands and being able to query it. It was game-changing for our research and development teams and DevOps,” Perry commented.

Today, LiveU has expanded its use of Logz.io to encompass additional teams and technical use cases to improve observability, reduce overhead maintenance and accelerate troubleshooting across support and development processes. In fact, “now it’s a little saying in the company: ‘Is that [data] in Logz.io yet?’” Perry said.

More Effective Troubleshooting

“We work in an industry that is real-time. News and broadcast organizations are all about live, and live happens really, really, fast. We don’t have time to wait to investigate an issue. We needed to respond five seconds ago. Logz.io is one of those things that helps us respond extremely fast to issues,” explained Perry.

The platform’s easy-to-use syntax has led to LiveU’s support organization embracing the platform as part of its process. “Logz.io has become a critical part of understanding exactly what’s happening at any given time with our infrastructure,” Perry said. It allows them to rapidly reconstruct a timeline of events to pinpoint what may have occurred and quickly mitigate it. It’s even used on-premises at customers, where some have LiveU equipment decoding footage 24/7. Shipping the logs to Logz.io to parse the data and create alerts has helped streamline support in those mission-critical cases.

Proactive Alerting

“Alerting is one of the most powerful pieces we use today,” commented Perry when talking about the organization’s experience with Logz.io. Over time LiveU has built a robust catalog of alerts that notify teams of critical issues for rapid troubleshooting. The ability to flag severity has been extremely helpful in creating triggers for PagerDuty when certain alerting thresholds are reached. These specific and detailed alerts have become even more valuable as LiveU can leverage them immediately to diagnose the root problem, such as in the case of regression or known reoccurring issues.

Enabling Velocity and Innovation

LiveU has several development teams that are agile by design and operate within an extremely tight CI/CD pipeline. Using Logz.io, development teams can confidently push a release and proactively create customized log-based alerts to stay on top of any issues that appear. Perry explained, “It allows us to move at a faster velocity in research and development as a whole than it would if we didn’t have that observability.”

Additionally, when adopting new technologies like containers and serverless models, Logz.io has also helped LiveU overcome many traditional challenges associated with monitoring them. With the Cloud-Native Observability Platform, the team can ship logs from those new technologies to Logz.io and see accurate information about what’s happening in a centralized location, enabling maximum performance and availability. 

The Future 

In the future, LiveU hopes to send even more data to the Logz.io platform. Today logs from the tens of thousands of devices in the field are usually only shipped if there is a known issue and understanding the environment end-to-end today still requires more than a dozen tools. The team is exploring how they might identify the most critical data and have it flow into the system in real-time to get a customer-by-customer view of what’s going on around the globe, allowing them to improve products and services. “I think Logz.io will play a critical part in our journey towards reducing the fragmentation,” concluded Perry.

Challenges

• Limited visibility and context
• Fragmented monitoring data generated by numerous sources
• Monitoring new technologies such as containers and serverless workloads

Business Impact

• Centralized observability
• Enhanced investigation and debugging, — reducing MTTR
• Enabled the adoption of new cloud technologies
• Increased operational efficiency
• Improved customer support