Case Study: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt achieves real-time AWS spend visibility with InfluxData

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt - Customer Case Study

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH), a global K–12 learning company serving millions of students, needed real-time visibility into AWS spend across many accounts and business units, better DevOps monitoring, and automated KPI tracking. They ingest roughly 23 million hourly billing line items per month, making cost attribution, optimization, and product-level performance measurement difficult.

HMH deployed InfluxData (InfluxEnterprise/InfluxDB) with Telegraf for collection and Kapacitor for alerting, using per-team databases, retention policies, and high-cardinality tags to store and analyze time-series billing and KPI data. The solution delivered near real-time cost and product-level drilldowns (hourly cost, run rate), automated KPIs and alerts, greater engineering cost-awareness, and scalable, low-overhead DevOps monitoring.

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Robert Allen

Director Engineering