See how a Site Reliability Engineer notices that a nation is in football fever.
What I really like about my job is the challenge to operate a platform which is used by millions of people. A downtime of less than a minute would already be noticed by many and therefore we collect millions of metrics to monitor the health of all our services at every second.
On the other side this also means that we as a platform notice when some of our users suddenly have other interests. Of course, Christmas at around 4pm and New Year at midnight draw the most noticeable drops on the graph, but on the other hand we can also observe a positive impact when the weather is bad in most parts of the country — we love rainy weather.
Here’s a pretty normal curve showing the requests to our platform² on some unspectacular Monday afternoon and evening. On May 27th, the number of active users increased after dinner and at around 10pm people started moving to their bedrooms. We can also see the typical short spike at around 8:15pm followed by an immediate but slight drop for the TV prime time.
You see, running the biggest online platform of the country¹ gives us some insight into the general mood and interests of the nation. So, what about UEFA EURO 2024?
Is Austria in football fever?
Let’s take a look at the first game on Friday, June 14th. Yes, we can see that there was something going on outside of our platform. The prime time drop was more noticeable and turbulent than usual, and users also stayed awake a bit longer, to check willhaben at half time.
Well, you might say, the curve still looks very similar to the first one and you are not 100% convinced yet, that what we see here on that evening is really a football game. It could have been anything else, even the weather. Well, it was just the first game and Germany played against Scotland — not Austria.
Then let’s take a look at what happened, when Austria entered the field against France on June 17th:
Now the nation has gained momentum! The typical TV prime time almost disappeared from the graph, and instead our users got distracted by something that started at 9pm. Around 45 minutes later, many users quickly checked their willhaben app and disappeared again when Austria played the second half against France.
Yes! That’s definitely a nation in football fever! But even the biggest football fan wants to buy or sell something and gives willhaben a quick visit at around 11pm, before finally going to bed after a thrilling evening.
Is willhaben in football fever?
Actually, one would rather expect that Austria wins the group with 3 tough opponents than expecting me to talk about football — and now I’m even writing about it! What happened!? Well, that’s when some of your 350+ colleagues are also in football fever and at some point many others get “infected”.
On June 21st we had our annual team building. It’s a huge event. The whole company occupies an entire hotel to play the weirdest games, dance to music, relax in the sun, swim in the pool, eat, drink, party, eat more, dance more … and even watch football. Our own little stadium was shaking!
And how was the performance of our platform when the whole company was swimming, dancing, chilling and watching football? Austria and Poland started at 6pm, and that’s what we see here. Not only the company, but also the willhaben users obviously had a great time on that evening:
How euphoric is Austria about games of other countries?
Maybe you’re a big football fan and already noticed that some of the games are barely visible in our metrics. For example, if we again take the graph from June 17th, when Austria played against France:
Besides the game at 9pm there was also Romania/Ukraine at 3pm and Belgium/Slovakia at 6pm. But the effect of these games was very minimal — if there was even an effect on the usage of willhaben.
But when we again look at the metrics of June 21st, we definitely see not only Austria and Poland at 6pm, we also see Netherlands and France on the field at 9pm keeping the requests to willhaben at a lower level than usual.
What do you think? Do you see the reason for this? Maybe it was the day of the week — 17th was a Monday and 21st was a Friday. Maybe the biggest factor we have to take into account was that Netherlands and France played in the same group as Austria.
But maybe we are just comparing apples to oranges. Our server metrics definitely won’t give us an answer to everything and looking at the graphs from June 19th might defeat all our previous assumptions:
It was Albania/Croatia at 3pm, Germany/Hungary at 6pm and Scotland/Switzerland at 9pm. These plays of groups A and B were all slightly noticeable on our platform, even though the 19th was a Wednesday.
Austria in great mood
Let’s get our eyes back on Austria and watch what happens when the nation’s team wins against the Netherlands on June 25th:
The game started at 6pm and definitely had a huge impact on how users interacted with our apps and services. But still, our users are a loyal community and always come back later on. The two games at 9pm on that evening only had a tiny impact on our platform.
Austria in the round of 16
After this, Austria entered the round of 16 and on July 2nd at 9pm the nation’s team had to compete with Turkey. What started like a pretty normal afternoon and evening turned out to be very different for many people in our country:
Maybe not everyone was amused about the result, but as a Site Reliability Engineer I enjoyed the evening from a different perspective. I saw a nation burning for football and cheering for their team. While many people obviously had their eyes on the TV, I watched the game in our Prometheus metrics — and the impact of that game was impressive!
Usually, we see the highest number of requests shortly after 9pm. But on that Tuesday the traffic on our platform was more down at the level of 3pm in the afternoon. This is definitely a behaviour which we don’t see too often and is clearly the effect of a nation in football fever.
People used the halftime to quickly check their willhaben account but the typical drop at around 10pm was steeper than usual. At the end of the game, some users came back but even at 11:15pm we still had less traffic than on a normal Tuesday evening.
Conclusion
Sure, we collect these metrics for monitoring our platform, but working with them can be fun and reveal interesting details. I hope you enjoyed UEFA EURO 2024 now also from this different perspective. If you are interested in more, and want to see what we really use our metrics for, check out this piece of art, visit us in Vienna for one of our upcoming meetups or even apply to one of our open positions.
¹ According to numbers published by ÖWA.
² We intentionally removed all absolute numbers from these images; the lowest point on the Y axis might differ for some graphs and is not 0.
Watching UEFA EURO 2024 on willhaben server metrics was originally published in willhaben Tech Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.