Case Study: Etsy achieves real-time, query-level database visibility and consistent high performance with VividCortex

Etsy Keeps Their Global Community Engaged With A High-Performance Data Platform

Etsy is a global e‑commerce marketplace that depends on fast, highly available systems to keep buyers and sellers engaged. With a DevOps culture that deploys code dozens of times a day and hundreds of sharded MySQL servers under heavy load, the engineering and DBA teams faced a visibility challenge: traditional monitoring was too slow or superficial to detect replication lag, regressions from upgrades or schema changes, and other database problems in real time.

Etsy adopted VividCortex to gain always‑on, high‑resolution, query‑level metrics and long‑term trend retention. The platform made A/B testing (e.g., SSDs vs. spinning disks), MySQL upgrades, and schema migrations observable; surfaced replication lag MySQL’s own metrics missed; and democratized performance data across teams. The result was faster detection and diagnosis of issues, reduced risk of DBA bottlenecks, more confident deploys and capacity planning, and a more reliable marketplace experience for global users.

Etsy

Jeremy Tinley

Sr. MySQL Ops Engineer