Table of Contents
Overview
Squirrels LLC is a privately owned software development company making strides in screen mirroring technology. Their apps, AirParrot, Reflector, and Ditto make it easier than ever to share and mirror screens on various devices without the hassle of cables or adapters. That's right--you can mirror screens wirelessly! Notably, Reflector has positively impacted education since it launched in 2012, when schools and universities began using the app to facilitate classroom lessons and discussions. Thanks to Reflector, students and teachers can display or record screens on various devices in a classroom setting. The increasing popularity of Squirrels apps meant that the team needed an effective way to generate fast and reliable usage statistics. Squirrels found the perfect solution with Hosted Graphite through MetricFire.
The Problem
"I knew that I wanted to use Graphite and Grafana, but I also knew that I didn’t want to be in charge of maintaining the server".
As more businesses and schools started using Reflector and AirParrot, clients began to request usage statistics. "We didn't have that kind of data structure framework, and we didn't have the developer staff to build it from scratch," said a Squirrels LLC teammate. For a small developer team of ten, delivering the information and maintaining the apps running smoothly took a lot of work. The price range was one of the biggest problems because "resources were a little thin."
Squirrels LLC started looking for a cloud-based provider and statistics engine that met the team's needs: "I knew that I wanted to use Graphite and Grafana, but I also knew that I didn't want to be in charge of maintaining the server." They needed something reliable, affordable, and straightforward to use.
- Affordability: Squirrels needed more staff or capital to develop their usage metrics, and creating their infrastructure would have been egregiously expensive. They needed to find a budget-friendly alternative to generate the metrics the clients requested.
- Easy to use: One of the main concerns was finding a service that was easy to learn so that it could be taught to the rest of the developers.
- Speed: Clients wanted their data usage statistics almost immediately after requesting them. Whatever service Squirrels chose had to keep up with this demand.
The Solution
By sharing metrics like Time Metered and Connection Count, Hosted Graphite lets Squirrels show clients exactly how their service is being used.
Through Hosted Graphite, Squirrels found a service with a competitive price point and customer support that matched. Squirrels are very satisfied with the Hosted Graphite team, which is "super helpful in using their expertise to guide us."
Hosted Graphite lets Squirrels interact with the API, so they don't have to make their connections to Graphite. Squirrels were worried about being able to teach the rest of the team how to use the platform "without too much confusion." Because Hosted Graphite is very user-friendly, the other developers quickly learned how to use it.
The benefits for Squirrels clients are exemplified through the app Ditto. When a client connects to Ditto, the app starts gathering its own metrics. Once the screen-sharing session is finished, it is sent back to the Squirrels API. Squirrels process the metrics and input them into Hosted Graphite. By sharing metrics like Time Metered and Connection Count, Hosted Graphite lets Squirrels show clients exactly how their service is being used.
Of course, the metrics are useful not only to the clients but also to give Squirrels insight into trends for high and low periods of usage. Knowing this information allows the Squirrels team to plan maintenance and updates at times when they are least disruptive to clients. Furthermore, Hosted Graphite shows a connection count of how many sessions are taking place at any given moment, helping the team accurately predict trends in platform usage.
The metric specifications available at Hosted Graphite have been tremendously helpful to Squirrels. The metric Time Mirroring has to be extremely precise because clients want to see how employees are using the software. While most platforms display information as an average or a sum, Hosted Graphite displays both. They explain that "whenever you set up Graphite, you must define its specifications: whether it will roll its data as an average or a sum." Often, sum and average measures alone do not accurately indicate system usage. Together, they give valuable insights into application usage and health - "The ability to have both data sets available to us is incredible and very important."
Protecting client privacy is important to the Squirrels team. Instead of exposing the Grafana and Graphite dashboards to the clients directly, the Squirrels team takes the generated metrics and writes custom queries to show each client their individual usage statistics. Hosted Graphite makes the process seamless.
The Result
The Squirrels team constantly looks for ways to make technology more useful and accessible. For a year now, MetricFire has helped them by monitoring their data and letting them do their best: create innovative technology. Squirrels can focus on making the best version of their product because they know that MetricFire is a reliable service that will take care of all the metrics for them. Because of MetricFire, the Squirrels team can work on screen-sharing libraries and their platform integration. They know that if they ever have questions, they can always contact MetricFire's customer support.
Setting up a platform to generate metrics is a highly time-consuming task that Squirrels did not want to undertake: "If I had to stop what I was doing, set up the cluster, and do everything on my own, I would have never been able to do it!" Thanks to Hosted Graphite, they didn't have to!
"If I had to stop what I was doing, set up the cluster and do everything on my own, I would have never been able to do it!"
Get to know our MetricFire better and see how It can fit into your monitoring environment! Get a free trial and start monitoring right away. Feel free to book a demo if you have questions about what Hosted Graphite can do.
