The problem
For anyone managing inventory, reselling, or simply trying to catch a release the moment it happens, ticket availability is the whole game — and it's scattered across incompatible systems. AXS, Ticketmaster, TF and evenue-powered venues each expose seat and ticket data through their own page structure, their own request format, and their own session requirements. Checking by hand, across more than a handful of events, stops working almost immediately.
What was built
A dedicated puller per vendor — each platform's seat-map or event-search response parsed on its own terms — feeding into one normalized availability format instead of four incompatible ones. Polling ran on a schedule tight enough to catch real changes without tripping rate limits, with JSON/XML parsing tuned to each vendor's actual response shape: seat maps, price tiers, section-level inventory.
Why this is the hard part
Pulling data once is easy. Keeping four independently-changing platforms working at the same time is the actual engineering problem — each vendor updates its own structure on its own schedule, has its own anti-bot posture, and fails in its own way. A monitoring system like this is only useful if it surfaces when a vendor's structure has drifted, rather than silently going stale. That's the same discipline behind Monitoring & Support as a standing service, not just a one-off build.