Comcast transforms experiences with Elastic Observability

Comcast, a global telecommunications and media giant, faced the challenge of maintaining exceptional customer experiences across its vast network of services, including Xfinity, NBCUniversal, and Peacock. With millions of customers relying on Comcast for information and entertainment, ensuring always-on availability and rapid innovation was paramount. Matt Dymek, VP of Software Strategy & Transformation at Comcast, emphasized the need for systems to be consistently available with split-second performance, anticipating customer needs and preferences in an increasingly complex environment.

To meet these demands, Comcast turned to Elastic Observability to gain comprehensive insights into its IT infrastructure. By ingesting approximately 400 terabytes of telemetry data daily, Elastic Observability enables Comcast to aggregate, correlate, and inspect data from about 70 tenants across its IT infrastructure. This single view, from the application layer to the hardware, allows Comcast to monitor the impact of changes on its systems, facilitating the detection of issues early in the software development process.

The implementation of Elastic Observability has empowered Comcast's engineering teams to accelerate software lifecycles and deliver innovative features that attract and retain customers. By establishing a logging and metrics standard built on Elastic Common Schema (ECS), Comcast ensures data consistency and unifies all modes of analysis, including search, drill-down, data visualization, machine learning-based anomaly detection, and alerting. Looking ahead, Comcast aims to leverage Elastic AIOps and OpenTelemetry to further enhance troubleshooting and monitor key performance indicators.

Value Results:

Simplified Software Build Process: Elastic provides a unified view of the entire system, enabling Comcast to monitor the impact of changes across more than 50,000 daily software builds. Reduced Total Cost of Ownership: Elastic's strategic, partnership-based approach has lowered the total cost of ownership compared to Comcast's previous observability solution. Accelerated Innovation: Elastic generates data insights that ensure the availability of innovative customer experiences, such as UHD broadcasting and voice-activated remote control.