With Grafana, Gameforge solves metric visualization problems

With more than 20 titles and over 450 million registered players, Gameforge is the leading provider of free-to-play massively multiplayer online games (MMOs) in the western hemisphere. Headquartered in Karlsruhe, Germany, the group offers its online games in more than 75 countries and has over 450 employees on staff.

The challenge:
Gameforge’s system administration department was tasked with figuring out how to display millions of metrics their games produce every minute from over 2,000 servers, while providing developers and game teams a centralized tool with all necessary monitoring data. They needed a unified solution to provide a range of visualized metrics between various departments and teams.

The solution:
Grafana, along with the native data source Graphite, solved this problem at a level Gameforge never expected. Suddenly they had the ability to provide a dashboard-based metric solution for several departments, and everyone instantly liked it. Within a week they created over 50 dashboards, leveraged Graphite’s metric transformation functions, and integrated the permission system into their SSO System.

From a SysAdmin perspective, Grafana is awesome to use. No Admin or Developer has to look or monitor a server manually anymore. It’s all centralized and prepared.
Felix Oechsler, Technical Director, Gameforge

The right combination of features

Gameforge tried several monitoring tools – some commercial, some self-developed – but none of these solved all of their feature requirements. One major requirement was a centralized location for graphs and dashboards that could be viewed and shared between teams. Another important feature was a robust permission system that could provide tailored dashboards for both single departments as well as teams. And one of the most important requirements was an easy-to-use query builder and function editor. Grafana was the only solution that met these needs and worked perfectly out of the box.

Grafana and Graphite became the perfect solution for us and the whole company. We are able to provide precisely tailored dashboards for other departments and game teams.
Felix Oechsler, Technical Director, Gameforge

Democratizing metrics

Grafana and Graphite became the perfect solution at Gameforge, not only for the System Administration team, but the company as a whole. Now, with one interface, System Administration can monitor server performance and other game server related metrics, Development can glean valuable application insights, and the Game Teams have gained a clear overview of what is happening inside the games in real-time – all of which have greatly improved Gameforge’s overall business processes.