February 2017 Summaries

Mux, a video streaming platform, developed an anomaly detection system in Summer 2016 using Apache Flink. The system was designed to scale easily without sacrificing performance, support alerting for infrequently-played videos, and have low latency. Apache Flink is a stream processing engine that can handle unbounded event streams with guaranteed exactly-once event-time processing. It allows real-time Map-Reduce operations on streaming events and supports both processing-time and event-time modes for time-series data. Mux uses Flink to calculate playback error rates across video titles and customer properties, enabling real-time alerts and anomaly detection.

Mux is introducing ASNs (Autonomous System Numbers) as a new dimension to provide valuable insights into viewer's experience. An ASN uniquely identifies each Autonomous System in the Internet, which is typically associated with an ISP. By combining this data with other dimensions like country and browser, users can gain better understanding of their customers' viewing habits and identify potential areas for video performance improvement. Mux has already integrated ASN data into its system, backfilled to mid-December 2016.