[CrankyFool]

"Anomaly detection" is one of those vague terms that can mean anything from "it's gone above the pre-set limit, and that's anomalous" to "the system has studied the signal to learn what the accepted limits should be, and it's exceeded these limits." We mostly mean the latter for anomaly detection.

The Insight Engineering team at Netflix is largely composed of four kinds of engineers: Platform/back-end engineers, UI engineers, Site Reliability Engineers, and Real-Time Analytics (RTA) engineers; it's the latter group of engineers who are looking into ways to quickly (and efficienlty) detect anomalies in a truly-absurd amount of data.

The RTA group is now about 6 months old or thereabouts; I have high hopes that we'll see some public presentations from them soon that will be helpful to other people outside Netflix.