About OzTam
OzTAM is the official source of television audience measurement (TAM) covering Australia’s five mainland metropolitan markets and nationally for subscription television.
OzTAM manages and markets television ratings data for total television viewing in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth across all television households and nationally for all subscription television households.
Main takeaways
- Drastically reduced time spent on Elasticsearch
- Optimized Elasticsearch to handle 700M events per day
- Improved root cause analysis and issue prevention
OzTam’s Elasticsearch Use Case – Over Half a Billion Events Every Day
OzTam has been using Elasticsearch for many years to ingest events from video-on-demand services. “We now have around 700 million events going into Elasticsearch every single day,” said Adam Donnison, OzTam’s Information Technology Specialist. OzTam’s Elasticsearch deployment needed to be able to handle the load and support their business growth while maintaining peak performance.
Elasticsearch is key to the analysis and visualization process of data on which shows are most popular, which hours most people tend to watch and other vital information that broadcasters need the most.
“We’ve had a lot of situations where we felt like we were pushing the limits of what Elasticsearch can cope with.”
“We’ve been using Elasticsearch since version 2 or so,” said Donnison. “We’ve had a lot of situations where we felt like we were pushing the limits of what Elasticsearch can cope with.”
“This year we were at the point of giving up on Elasticsearch,” Donnison said, explaining that the team had begun looking for alternatives.
With Opster, Elasticsearch is Easy
When trying to solve an issue in their cluster on their own, the OzTam team came across Opster’s free Elasticsearch Check-Up. “We decided to inquire further. As it turned out, it was the best thing we ever did.”
Prior to beginning to work with Opster, Donnison said his role had unintentionally become far more focused on running Elasticsearch than on his regular responsibilities. “Before Opster, I was probably spending over 30 percent of my time just nursing Elasticsearch. Now I sometimes don’t look at stats for a week.”
With Opster’s services and products, Donnison and the OzTam team realized they could continue using Elasticsearch, without the trials and tribulations they’d been dealing with for years. “3 months ago we were looking to ditch Elasticsearch, until we started working with Opster and it gave us confidence to continue with Elasticsearch moving forward.”
“I love the way Opster works with us, the proactive advice, the technology they provide, the dashboards and especially the Search Gateway. All of those things have proven to be really, really key in being able to pinpoint what is going on in our system.”
“Before Opster, I was probably spending over 30% of my time just nursing Elasticsearch. I love the way Opster works with us, the proactive advice, the technology they provide – working with Opster gave us the confidence to continue with Elasticsearch moving forward.”
“The Opster team is really good at identifying issues and coming up with solutions. It’s been a revelation working with Opster, to be honest.”
Improved Elasticsearch Performance with Opster
“With Opster, I know that if I have a question about a problem, I’m going to get a straight answer and one that has thought behind it. I know that we’re going to get our problem solved,” said Donnison. Aside from ongoing support, OzTam also has periodic support calls with the Opster team. Over the last few months, OzTam has improved their cluster stability, optimized sharding and improved search visibility and optimization.
