IMPACT Featured Content: Real user performance monitoring at Netflix scale – Martin Spier, Netflix

The Mullen Foundation was established in 1990 to honor the memory of J. William (Bill) Mullen, past president of CMG. He was an exceptional person: his technical papers and conference presentations were outstanding and his ability to connect with everyone in his audience was truly remarkable. CMG established the Mullen Foundation to recognize individuals who demonstrate this unique combination of technical excellence and ability to communicate with each member of a wide audience.

“Martin is a dynamic Netflix speaker and this award is a testament not just to his technical excellence, but also to his ability to communicate,” said Amanda Hendley, President and Managing Director of CMG. “Martin’s presentation was judged outstanding by his audience and by our referee. We were all impressed listening to him talk about how Netflix usefully aggregates enormous quantities of high-dimensional data. It’s been an absolute pleasure to present him with this award.”

Ed Hunter, Engineering Leader at Netflix, noted that Martin has been immersed in the study of user performance for the last few years. “The results of his investigations are already having a measurable impact on our business. I’m excited to see his efforts recognized by an organization like CMG.”  

Real User Performance Monitoring at Netflix Scale

Netflix runs on thousands of different devices, from smartphones to laptops, smart TVs and gaming consoles. These devices are spread all around the world, have a vastly different set of capabilities, resource constraints, and run under a multitude of network conditions. Understanding how real users perceive Netflix’s app performance is key to optimizing the right things, finding issues, and improving user experience. Real user monitoring might can be as simple as signing up for a third party service, snapping a JavaScript to a page, and waiting for a report, but for Netflix, it’s not that trivial. This talk will cover the challenges Netflix faced while developing a real user monitoring solution, that is able to consistently track app performance, across thousands of different devices, all across the globe. It will also explain how Netflix collects and processes the large amount of data generated by these devices, using open source solutions such as Druid and Apache Spark, and the tools that were created to help our engineers analyze this data, understand how real users perceive performance, and ultimately create a better experience for them.

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