Gannett, America’s largest newspaper publisher, improves observability with Google Cloud's operations suite
About Gannett Media Corp.
Gannett Media Corp. is the largest U.S. newspaper company, with more than 250 local newspapers and its flagship brand, USA Today.
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Contact usGoogle Cloud's operations suite helps Gannett Media consolidate its monitoring and logging activities into one cloud-native observability suite, helping the company ensure always-on access for its digital media.
As more readers go online for news, newspaper publishers are moving with them. For Gannett, creating digital content that people are willing to pay for, and attracting and retaining subscription readers, are essential to its continued growth and market leadership.
Gannett is the largest U.S. media company with a local to national reach and is quickly adapting to changes in how readers get their news. With 253 daily media brands including USA Today and 308 weekly brands, the company has transformed from a print-only newspaper company to a leader in delivering news and content online. Through 375 local news websites, Gannett reaches a digital audience of more than 140 million each month—over 50 percent of the total U.S. digital audience—and has just cleared 1 million digital-only subscribers.
Gannett delivers breaking news to editorial desks across the country using a content management system that runs on Google Cloud and it publishes that news to readers through its websites, which run on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE).
Too many vendors, not enough results
The publisher’s websites and corporate content management system are supported by its centralized IT operation. Rather than having one or two monolithic projects to monitor, the IT group has more than 200 projects spread widely across the company. With applications broken up into containers, each project can consist of thousands of parts, and without the proper tools, tracking down performance issues can be difficult.
Gannett currently uses tools from industry-leading vendors for logging, monitoring, and application performance metrics. But this multi-vendor solution has been cumbersome and time-consuming to use, and it doesn’t always provide the level of visibility necessary to ensure the websites and other services are always available. If a Gannett website is not delivering an industry-leading experience, readers have too many other options where they can go for news.
As part of Gannett’s journey to modernization, the company plans to consolidate all its monitoring activities into Google Cloud's operations suite. The goal is comprehensive observability to monitor its Google Cloud, AWS, and on-premises environments to get ahead of performance problems.
“The level of network logging and the visibility I get is absolutely wonderful.”
—James Hayner, Platform Developer, Gannett Media Corp.Getting started with Google Cloud's operations suite
Initially, Gannett wanted to help its content engineering team address a five-minute latency in queuing Pub/Sub metrics. Using Google Cloud's operations tools, Gannett eliminated the latency to provide true real-time metrics for monitoring its content system. Erik Rogneby, Director of Platform Engineering at Gannett, says, “Zero latency is huge for us. If you’re a publishing company and have content coming in, and the queue gets blocked or is spiking, hundreds of thousands of messages get queued in that five minutes before an alarm goes off.”
With zero latency for monitoring, Gannett can better discern whether a traffic spike is random or part of a trending surge, in which case, the IT team needs to know about it fast and act swiftly. Rogneby says, “Having real-time visibility and analytics is a big advantage as opposed to aggregates or something similar. Being able to drill into that bandwidth saturation is helpful. It was easy to get that with the cloud-native tools.”
Gannett’s next step with Google Cloud’s operations tools was to monitor its hub-and-spoke network to better understand bandwidths, particularly around VPNs that reach out to AWS and its on-premises data centers. Rogneby says, “This is another area where, if you're having an issue, you need to know quickly, and it made sense for us to use Google Cloud-native tools for that.”
In addition, all of Gannett’s 18 Kubernetes clusters are using Cloud Monitoring to monitor application performance. Rogneby says, “Kubernetes is a big deal for us and we’re getting these metrics out of the box with Google Cloud's operations suite.”
Election Day is the new Black Friday
Election Day is Gannett’s version of Black Friday, when millions of readers count on the company for real-time updates. For the 2020 elections, Gannett relied heavily on Google Cloud's operations tools to monitor the unprecedented traffic.
At the election’s peak at 10:00 PM, the system delivered 105,000 page views per minute, which is three times the normal traffic of 35,000 views per minute. In all, the system handled 64 million page views with ease during election night, and the next day got its highest traffic ever with 85 million views.
James Hayner, Platform Developer at Gannett, was on the scene for election night and felt secure using Google Cloud's operations suite to monitor the activity. He says, “The level of network logging and the visibility I get is absolutely wonderful. I can actually see what’s happening and work out issues with VPNs between Google and AWS by digging into the logs in Cloud Logging and providing them to AWS to resolve issues.”
“There's zero setup required and the integration works across the board to find errors.... Having the direct integration with the cloud-native aspects gets us the information in a timely fashion.”
—Erik Rogneby, Director of Platform Engineering, Gannett Media Corp.Operating at the speed of news
Even on a normal day, the Gannett newsroom is a fast-paced environment where reporters and editors rely on seamless support from the company’s content management system to publish breaking news. As a result of its recent merger with GateHouse Media, editors ingested an avalanche of new content into the system. Hayner says, “The monitoring alerts gave us an indication there were issues with network bandwidth and throughput, and with the dashboards we could see what projects and workloads were being affected. Being able to see that and reach out to the teams enabled us to figure out where we needed to beef up and add more VPNs to support the traffic.”
Going cloud native
Rogneby says Gannett prefers services native to Google Cloud. “They just work. There's zero setup required and the integration works across the board to find errors and other things. And there are little features that are well thought through and integrated,” for example, being able to go directly to logs from a Google service like GKE. “Not having to set that up or do correlations has been great, and having the direct integration with the cloud-native aspects gets us the information in a timely fashion.”
Hayner adds, “Features that are built into Google Cloud, like Pub/Sub or networking—services that I can natively log in to—I find very useful.”
The teams could have wired up another solution, but “there would've been latency and the level of effort to get it working would've been a lot higher,” says Rogneby. “There are always other tools you can use, but this was so easy to set up, the metrics were already there, and we could set the threshold alerts. It all worked really well for us.”
“Both in terms of recent feature deliveries and the projected road map, we believe that the Google Cloud's operations suite is becoming a full-fledged platform in the observability space. The roadmap generated a lot of excitement from our platform team as well as key internal stakeholders from operations, security, and development.”
—Erik Rogneby, Director of Platform Engineering, Gannett Media Corp.Saving valuable time
User management for operational tools can be a massive drain on resources, and Rogneby says it’s something that Google Cloud does well. “The fine-grained identity and access management controls that continue to get driven down from platform services into operational tools is a huge benefit for us,” he says. “It’s part of the same IAM permission system as the rest of the Google Cloud tools, which is super nice. The amount of time the team spends provisioning users into various systems and trying to troubleshoot that aspect is costly from a morale standpoint. And good cloud engineers are not inexpensive.”
Hayner likes the curated dashboards that come with the Google Cloud's operations tools, in particular the VPN dashboard, which shows a complete inventory of the types of VPNs that are running. He says, “The fact that we've been able to take advantage of some of these dashboards has been really good, especially with the scope and breadth we run. The documentation has also been really helpful. It gives you a list of the metrics, tells you what they’re for, and gives you clear understanding to enable you to find the metrics you need to see.”
“Gannett’s delivery of the unprecedented 2020 elections was a resounding success from a performance and user engagement perspective. That could not have been achieved without our strong partner in Google Cloud. The infrastructure was rock solid during the whole election event, even with the dramatic surges in traffic we received. And the white glove support we got leading up to and during the elections allowed us to exercise and strengthen our platform.”
—Erik Bursch, Vice President of Platform Technology, Gannett Media Corp.Getting more value from Google Cloud's operations suite
Gannett is still in the early stages of its journey with the Google Cloud's operations suite and will continue to work toward its goal of using the tools to create a single cloud-native observability platform. Rogneby says, “Both in terms of recent feature deliveries and the projected roadmap, we believe that Google Cloud's operations suite is becoming a full-fledged platform in the observability space. The road map generated a lot of excitement from our platform team as well as key internal stakeholders from operations, security, and development."
The company is looking ahead to getting more value from Google Cloud's operations suite and is considering using Google Cloud’s rich data analytics capabilities for deeper operational insight.
The combination of Google Cloud and the operations tools has been a big win for Gannett. Erik Bursch, the company’s Vice President of Platform Technology, says, “Gannett’s delivery of the unprecedented 2020 elections was a resounding success from a performance and user engagement perspective. That could not have been achieved without our strong partner in Google Cloud. The infrastructure was rock solid during the whole election event, even with the dramatic surges in traffic we received. And the white glove support we got leading up to and during the elections allowed us to exercise and strengthen our platform.”
In the end, a frictionless customer experience comes down to having the right tools in place for observability. For Gannett, Google Cloud's operations suite is a key component to successfully delivering digital content that people want to pay for.
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
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About Gannett Media Corp.
Gannett Media Corp. is the largest U.S. newspaper company, with more than 250 local newspapers and its flagship brand, USA Today.