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Cittio Assembles AdBrite's WatchTowerBy Pedro HernandezAugust 28, 2007
Monitoring a thousand servers is no small task. Monitoring that many ad servers, however, is another matter entirely. This is especially the case for San Francisco, CA-based AdBrite, the 10 largest online ad network. In the Internet advertising business, uptime comes first and foremost, explains Mike Reaves, VP of engineering for AdBrite. Not only do his company's servers deliver billions of ads, some are responsible for the self-service aspect of the business. Which means that outages can result in lost revenue in ads that go un-served and clients that can't log into their accounts and engage in transactions. The challenge is compounded by the scale of both of his operations and of the marketplace AdBrite reaches. With data centers in San Francisco, New York and Germany -- and soon San Jose -- the company has to contend with the snags that geography injects into day-to-day IT operations. From these data centers, according to today's count, the firm is currently serving "739 million impressions a day on 31,619 sites." Typically, their ads appear on 1 billion pages a day, reaching 55 million unique users every month. Obviously, one critical responsibility is the "need to maintain SLA service" on his company's behalf, says Reaves. But it is the interconnectedness of online marketplaces that can send ripples felt beyond his data centers and underscores the importance of server monitoring on his end. "Since we're on so many web sites," says Reaves, "and since the code is inline," if his ad serving systems slow or become unavailable, it can cause web pages to hang. This would draw the ire of web publishers and cause the end-user experience to suffer, a situation his company works hard to avoid. To cope with these demands, AdBrite settled on a combination of Cittio WatchTower software and Cittio Managed Administration Services CMAS. Founded in 2003 by Philip J. Kaplan of F*ckedCompany.com fame, AdBrite is now riding the wave of increased online ad spending and the vibrant market that is springing up as a result. And that means more of everything: data centers, servers, bandwidth... So, to keep an eye on its growing server infrastructures AdBrite relies on Cittio to "monitor the monitor" on a 24/7 basis and relay performance data to the firm's IT staffers. Under this blended software/services platform, AdBrite gains network-wide monitoring and alerting that benefits from Watchtower's automated discovery and configuration, and is backed by the watchful eyes at Cittio CMAS operations center. With this visibility into AdBrite's environments, Cittio can alert the proper IT staffers if a server or network issue threatens to impact their ad serving capabilities, along with recommended actions to take. For Reaves, the attraction includes a "customizable reporting feature" and a cost effective offering that undercut the competition substantially without sacrificing on utility -- he looked at many big-name, enterprise-grade alternatives. Primarily, however, he credits Cittio with allowing his staff to devote their time to the company's "core competence," not administering to a monitoring platform. "By implementing Cittio WatchTower with CMAS, AdBrite’s IT staff can focus on serving ads and serving our customers – not configuring our monitoring system," says Reaves.
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