How WOW! Modernized Legacy Infrastructure Monitoring with InfluxDB and Kafka

WOW!, a US-based broadband provider with over 500,000 customers, faced challenges in monitoring their diverse network infrastructure due to varying technologies and vendor-locked data collection. They needed a centralized observability platform to analyze node and network health. After selecting InfluxDB Enterprise as their time series database backend, WOW! modernized their legacy system by building a four-node InfluxDB cluster for production and leveraging InfluxDB's alerting frameworks and Grafana for customized dashboarding. A Kafka cluster was added between data sources and InfluxDB for redundancy and control, while Telegraf was used to collect data from virtual machines and containers. The implementation of an infrastructure-as-code system using Ansible enabled automation of cluster setup and installation. With the TIG stack, WOW! achieved higher functionality and lower downtimes.