Add user interview with Europace (#697)

content/blog/2017-04-06-interview-with-europace.md

+---
+title: Interview with Europace
+created_at: 2017-04-06
+kind: article
+author_name: Brian Brazil
+---
+
+*Continuing our series of interviews with users of Prometheus, Tobias Gesellchen from
+Europace talks about how they discovered Prometheus.*
+
+
+## Can you tell us about Europace does?
+
+[Europace AG](https://www.europace.de/) develops and operates the web-based
+EUROPACE financial marketplace, which is Germany’s largest platform for
+mortgages, building finance products and personal loans. A fully integrated
+system links about 400 partners – banks, insurers and financial product
+distributors. Several thousand users execute some 35,000 transactions worth a
+total of up to €4 billion on EUROPACE every month.  Our engineers regularly
+blog at [http://tech.europace.de/](http://tech.europace.de/) and
+[@EuropaceTech](https://twitter.com/europacetech).
+
+## What was your pre-Prometheus monitoring experience?
+
+[Nagios](https://www.nagios.org/)/[Icinga](https://www.icinga.com/) are still
+in use for other projects, but with the growing number of services and higher
+demand for flexibility we looked for other solutions. Due to Nagios and Icinga
+being more centrally maintained, Prometheus matched our aim to have the full
+DevOps stack in our team and move specific responsibilities from our
+infrastructure team to the project members.
+
+## Why did you decide to look at Prometheus?
+
+Through our activities in the [Docker Berlin
+community](https://www.meetup.com/Docker-Berlin/) we had been in contact with
+[SoundCloud](https://soundcloud.com/) and [Julius
+Volz](https://twitter.com/juliusvolz), who gave us a good overview. The
+combination of flexible Docker containers with the highly flexible label-based
+concept convinced us give Prometheus a try.  The Prometheus setup was easy
+enough, and the Alertmanager worked for our needs, so that we didn’t see any
+reason to try alternatives. Even our little pull requests to improve the
+integration in a Docker environment and with messaging tools had been merged
+very quickly.  Over time, we added several exporters and Grafana to the stack.
+We never looked back or searched for alternatives.
+
+![Grafana dashboard for Docker Registry](/assets/blog/2017-04-06/europace_grafana_1.png)
+
+## How did you transition?
+
+Our team introduced Prometheus in a new project, so the transition didn’t
+happen in our team. Other teams started by adding Prometheus side by side to
+existing solutions and then migrated the metrics collectors step by step.
+Custom exporters and other temporary services helped during the migration.
+Grafana existed already, so we didn’t have to consider another dashboard. Some
+projects still use both Icinga and Prometheus in parallel.
+
+## What improvements have you seen since switching?
+
+We had issues using Icinga due to scalability - several teams maintaining a
+centrally managed solution didn’t work well. Using the Prometheus stack along
+with the Alertmanager decoupled our teams and projects.  The Alertmanager is
+now able to be deployed in a [high availability
+mode](https://github.com/prometheus/alertmanager#high-availability), which is a
+great improvement to the heart of our monitoring infrastructure.
+
+## What do you think the future holds for Europace and Prometheus?
+
+Other teams in our company have gradually adopted Prometheus in their projects.
+We expect that more projects will introduce Prometheus along with the
+Alertmanager and slowly replace Icinga. With the inherent flexibility of
+Prometheus we expect that it will scale with our needs and that we won’t have
+issues adapting it to future requirements.
+