Monitoring at Spotify: The Story So Far

This post details the evolution of Spotify's operational monitoring from Zabbix and a homegrown RRD-backed system (sitemon) to a new approach focused on 'alerting as a service' and a push-based graphing system. It introduces Lyceum, a library built on Riemann for reproducible trigger testing and deployment. For graphing, it discusses the limitations of Graphite (hierarchical naming, sharding, rebalancing) and the benefits of a tag-based approach. The post announces the development of Heroic, a new time-series database inspired by KairosDB, designed to address performance and stability issues, and to support self-service and distributed operational responsibility.