Add interview with L’Atelier Animation (#765)

content/blog/2017-06-14-interview-with-latelier-animation.md

+---
+title: Interview with L’Atelier Animation
+created_at: 2017-06-14
+kind: article
+author_name: Brian Brazil
+---
+
+*Continuing our series of interviews with users of Prometheus, Philippe Panaite
+and Barthelemy Stevens from L’Atelier Animation talk about how they switched
+their animation studio from a mix of Nagios, Graphite and InfluxDB to
+Prometheus.*
+
+## Can you tell us about yourself and what L’Atelier Animation does?
+
+[L’Atelier Animation](http://www.latelieranimation.com/) is a 3D animation studio based in
+the beautiful city of Montreal Canada. Our first feature film
+["Ballerina"](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2261287/combined) (also known as
+"Leap") was released worldwide in 2017, US release is expected later this year.
+
+We’re currently hard at work on an animated TV series and on our second feature
+film.
+ 
+Our infrastructure consists of around 300 render blades, 150 workstations and
+twenty various servers. With the exception of a couple of Macs, everything runs
+on Linux ([CentOS](https://www.centos.org/)) and not a single Windows machine.   
+
+ 
+## What was your pre-Prometheus monitoring experience?
+ 
+At first we went with a mix of [Nagios](https://www.nagios.org/),
+[Graphite](https://graphiteapp.org/), and
+[InfluxDB](https://www.influxdata.com).  The initial setup was “ok” but nothing
+special and over complicated (too many moving parts).   
+
+
+## Why did you decide to look at Prometheus?
+ 
+When we switched all of our services to CentOS 7, we looked at new monitoring
+solutions and Prometheus came up for many reasons, but most importantly:
+
+  * Node Exporter: With its customization capabilities, we can fetch any data from clients
+  * SNMP support: Removes the need for a 3rd party SNMP service
+  * Alerting system: ByeBye Nagios
+  * [Grafana](https://grafana.com/) support
+
+
+## How did you transition?
+
+When we finished our first film we had a bit of a downtime so it was a perfect
+opportunity for our IT department to make big changes. We decided to flush our
+whole monitoring system as it was not as good as we wanted.   
+
+One of the most important part is to monitor networking equipment so we started
+by configuring [snmp_exporter](https://github.com/prometheus/snmp_exporter/) to
+fetch data from one of our switches. The calls to NetSNMP that the exporter
+makes are different under CentOS so we had to re-compile some of the binaries,
+we did encounter small hiccups here and there but with the help of Brian Brazil
+from [Robust Perception](https://www.robustperception.io/), we got everything
+sorted out quickly. Once we got snmp_exporter working, we were able to easily
+add new devices and fetch SNMP data. We now have our core network monitored in
+Grafana (including 13 switches, 10 VLANs).
+
+![Switch metrics from SNMP data](/assets/blog/2017-06-14/switches.png)
+
+After that we configured
+[node_exporter](https://github.com/prometheus/node_exporter/) as we required
+analytics on workstations, render blades and servers. In our field, when a CPU
+is not at 100% it’s a problem, we want to use all the power we can so in the
+end temperature is more critical. Plus, we need as much uptime as possible so
+all our stations have email alerts setup via Prometheus’s
+[Alertmanager](https://prometheus.io/docs/alerting/alertmanager/) so we’re
+aware when anything is down.
+
+![Dashboard for one workstation](/assets/blog/2017-06-14/workstation.png)
+
+Our specific needs require us to monitor custom data from clients, it’s made
+easy through the use of node_exporter’s [textfile
+collector](https://github.com/prometheus/node_exporter#textfile-collector)
+function. A cronjob outputs specific data from any given tool into a
+pre-formatted text file in a format readable by Prometheus.   
+
+Since all the data is available through the HTTP protocol, we wrote a
+[Python](https://www.python.org/) script to fetch data from Prometheus. We
+store it in a [MySQL](https://www.mysql.com/) database accessed via a web
+application that creates a live floor map. This allows us to know with a simple
+mouse over which user is seated where with what type of hardware.  We also
+created another page with user’s picture & departement information, it helps
+new employees know who’s their neighbour.  The website is still an ongoing
+project so please don’t judge the look, we’re sysadmins after all not web
+designers :-)
+
+![Floormap with workstation detail](/assets/blog/2017-06-14/floormap.png)
+
+
+## What improvements have you seen since switching?
+
+It gave us an opportunity to change the way we monitor everything in the studio
+and inspired us to create a new custom floor map with all the data which has
+been initially fetched by Prometheus. The setup is a lot simpler with one
+service to rule them all.
+
+
+## What do you think the future holds for L’Atelier Animation and Prometheus?
+
+We’re currently in the process of integrating software licenses usage with
+Prometheus. The information will give artists a good idea of whom is using what
+and where.
+
+We will continue to customize and add new stuff to Prometheus by user demand
+and since we work with artists, we know there will be plenty :-) With SNMP and
+the node_exporter’s custom text file inputs, the possibilities are endless...