Add user interview with iAdvize (#743)

content/blog/2017-05-17-interview-with-iadvize.md

+---
+title: Interview with iAdvize
+created_at: 2017-05-17
+kind: article
+author_name: Brian Brazil
+---
+
+*Continuing our series of interviews with users of Prometheus, Laurent
+COMMARIEU from iAdvize talks about how they replaced their legacy Nagios and
+Centreon monitoring with Prometheus.*
+
+
+## Can you tell us about iAdvize does?
+
+I am Laurent COMMARIEU, a system engineer at iAdvize.  I work within the 60
+person R&D department in a team of 5 system engineers. Our job is mainly to
+ensure that applications, services and the underlying system are up and
+running. We are working with developers to ensure the easiest path for their
+code to production, and provide the necessary feedback at every step. That’s
+where monitoring is important.
+
+iAdvize is a full stack conversational commerce platform.  We provide an easy
+way for a brand to centrally interact with their customers, no matter the
+communication channel (chat, call, video, Facebook Pages, Facebook Messenger,
+Twitter, Instagram, WhatsApp, SMS, etc...). Our customers work in [ecommerce,
+banks, travel, fashion, etc. in 40
+countries](http://www.iadvize.com/en/customers/). We are an international
+company of 200 employees with offices in France, UK, Germany, Spain and Italy.
+We raised $16 Million in 2015.
+
+## What was your pre-Prometheus monitoring experience?
+
+I joined iAdvize in February 2016. Previously I worked in companies specialized
+in network and application monitoring. We were working with opensource software
+like [Nagios](https://www.nagios.org/), [Cacti](http://www.cacti.net/),
+[Centreon](https://www.centreon.com/), [Zabbix](http://www.zabbix.com/),
+[OpenNMS](https://www.opennms.org/en), etc. and some non-free ones like [HP
+NNM](https://saas.hpe.com/en-us/software/network-node-manager-i-network-management-software),
+[IBM Netcool
+suite](http://www-03.ibm.com/software/products/en/netcool-network-management),
+[BMC Patrol](http://www.bmc.com/it-solutions/brands/patrol-proactivenet.html),
+etc.
+
+iAdvize used to delegate monitoring to an external provider. They ensured 24/7
+monitoring using Nagios and Centreon. This toolset was working fine with the
+legacy static architecture (barebone servers, no VMs, no containers). To
+complete this monitoring stack, we also use [Pingdom](https://www.pingdom.com/).
+
+With the moving our monolithic application towards a Microservices architecture
+(using Docker) and our will to move our current workload to an infrastructure
+cloud provider we needed to have more control and flexibility on monitoring. At
+the same time, iAdvize recruited 3 people, which grew the infrastructure team
+from 2 to 5.  With the old system it took at least a few days or a week to add
+some new metrics into Centreon and had a real cost (time and money).
+
+
+## Why did you decide to look at Prometheus?
+
+We knew Nagios and the like were not a good choice. Prometheus was the rising
+star at the time and we decided to PoC it. [Sensu](https://sensuapp.org/) was
+also on the list at the beginning but Prometheus seemed more promising for our
+use cases.
+
+We needed something able to integrate with Consul, our service discovery
+system.  Our micro services already had a /health route; adding a /metrics
+endpoint was simple. For about every tool we used, an exporter was available
+(MySQL, Memcached, Redis, nginx, FPM, etc.).
+
+On paper it looked good.
+
+![One of iAdvize's Grafana dashboards](/assets/blog/2017-05-17/iadvize-dashboard-1.png)
+
+## How did you transition?
+
+First of all, we had to convince the developers team (40 people) that
+Prometheus was the right tool for the job and that they had to add an exporter
+to their apps. So we did a little demo on RabbitMQ, we installed a RabbitMQ
+exporter and built a simple [Grafana](https://grafana.com/) dashboard to
+display usage metrics to developers. A Python script was written to create some
+queue and publish/consume messages.
+
+They were quite impressed to see queues and the messages appear in real time.
+Before that, developers didn't have access to any monitoring data. Centreon was
+restricted by our infrastructure provider. Today, Grafana is available to
+everyone at iAdvize, using the Google Auth integration to authenticate. There
+are 78 active accounts on it (from dev teams to the CEO).
+
+After we started monitoring existing services with Consul and cAdvisor, we
+monitored the actual presence of the containers. They were monitored using
+Pingdom checks but it wasn't enough.
+
+We developed a few custom exporters in Go to scrape some business metrics from
+our databases (MySQL and Redis).
+
+Soon enough, we were able to replace all the legacy monitoring by Prometheus. 
+
+![One of iAdvize's Grafana dashboards](/assets/blog/2017-05-17/iadvize-dashboard-2.png)
+
+## What improvements have you seen since switching?
+
+Business metrics became very popular and during sales periods everyone is
+connected to Grafana to see if we're gonna beat some record.  We monitor the
+number of simultaneous conversations, routing errors, agents connected, the
+number of visitors loading the iAdvize tag, calls on our API gateway, etc.
+
+We worked for a month to optimize our MySQL servers with analysis based on the
+[Newrelic exporter](https://github.com/jfindley/newrelic_exporter) and [Percona
+dashboard for grafana] (https://github.com/percona/grafana-dashboards). It was
+a real success, allowing us to discover inefficiencies and perform
+optimisations that cut database size by 45% and peak latency by 75%.
+
+There are a lot to say. We know if a AMQP queue has no consumer or if it is
+Filling abnormally. We know when a container restarts.
+
+The visibility is just awesome.
+
+That was just for the legacy platform.
+
+More and more micro services are going to be deployed in the cloud and
+Prometheus is used to monitor them. We are using Consul to register the
+services and Prometheus to discover the metrics routes. Everything works like a
+charm and we are able to build a Grafana dashboard with a lot of critical
+business, application and system metrics.
+
+We are building a scalable architecture to deploy our services with
+[Nomad](https://www.nomadproject.io/). Nomad registers healthy services in
+Consul and with some tags relabeling we are able to filter those with a tag
+name "metrics=true". It offers to us a huge gain in time to deploy the
+monitoring. We have nothing to do ^^.
+
+We also use the EC2 service discovery. It's really useful with auto-scaling
+groups. We scale and recycle instances and it's already monitored. No more
+waiting for our external infrastructure provider to notice what happens in
+production.
+
+We use alertmanager to send some alerts by SMS or in to our
+[Flowdock](https://www.flowdock.com/).
+
+## What do you think the future holds for iAdvize and Prometheus?
+
+
+* We are waiting for a simple way to add a long term scalable storage for our
+  capacity planning.
+* We have a dream that one day, our auto-scaling will be triggered by
+  Prometheus alerting. We want to build an autonomous system base on response
+  time and business metrics.
+* I used to work with [Netuitive](http://www.netuitive.com/), it had a great
+  anomaly detection feature with automatic correlation. It would be great to
+  have some in Prometheus.