Reworking Data Management and Metrics Infrastructure for Streamlined Oversight

Summary

Linden Lab, a developer of virtual environments and digital entertainment experiences, had been employing an open source, custom solution to manage an enormous amount of data generated from the ECS containers running both in the cloud and via on-prem data centers. The increasing complexity of this data logging system pushed the company to contract Taos to re-architecture their entire logging and metrics infrastructure to reduce the cost and resource consumption while strengthening efficiency and productivity.

“Linden Lab partnering with Taos reduced the complexity and expense of our logging and metrics system, and achieved better results than we’d hoped for. Taos did more than develop a working solution. They also educated our engineers on extending and maintaining it into the future, met our tight deadline, and did it all on budget.”

April White, Senior Systems Engineering Manager

Solution

Establishing a Whole New Infrastructure
Linden Lab didn’t just need an upgrade—the company had Taos find a way to improve its overall cloud native posture across several major network elements. This included designing and implementing a logging sidecar ECS Service/Task deployment pattern, where the company’s containerized applications will adhere. Plus, Taos helped the business establish essential AWS infrastructure to replace the existing log aggregation solution, which had become a source of growing cost and complexity.

Streamlined Data Logging Solution
With Linden Lab’s popular virtual world experiences, their apps generate massive data logs that must be constantly processed and stored. Aside from replacing the company’s complicated and costly log environment, Taos also helped Linden Lab develop essential analytics and reporting solutions to help the business react to outages and degradation of application services. This increases customers satisfaction through less downtime and faster responsiveness to technical issues.

Comprehensive Metrics Monitoring
Linden Lab needed a way to better monitor its internal operations as well as customer-side services and experiences, and Taos provided a new visualization platform for company-wide metrics. With metrics data collected by AWS native monitoring services, the integrated PagerDuty alerting solution also keeps the organization aware of any performance issues as quickly as they appear.

Guiding Beyond the Solution Shift
Taos didn’t just hand over a new solution or platform to Linden Lab to start using. The Taos team provided ongoing DevOps and engineering service and support to bring the new aggregation solution online and keep it aligned with best practices according to their AWS expertise. We brought technical and execution leadership to the re-architecture process, including daily engineering support and training in the new system.