Case Study: 7SIGNAL achieves <5-minute data freshness and faster queries with StarTree Cloud

7SIGNAL cuts data freshness from 23 minutes to <5 minutes with StarTree

7SIGNAL, a provider of enterprise Wi-Fi optimization, faced a challenge with data freshness in their monitoring platform. Their previous architecture, which used Apache Flink for pre-aggregation, created a 20-23 minute lag between an event and its appearance in dashboards. This latency prevented their customers from having real-time visibility for immediate troubleshooting. To solve this, they turned to vendor StarTree and implemented Apache Pinot on StarTree Cloud.

The solution involved shifting from write-time to query-time aggregation, simplifying their pipeline by removing Flink and ingesting data directly from Kafka into Pinot. By utilizing StarTree Cloud, 7SIGNAL offloaded operational complexity and used specific Pinot indexing strategies to maintain performance. This migration resulted in data freshness dropping to under 5 minutes, queries running 2-10x faster, and cost savings of over 50%.

7SIGNAL