The Enterprise Insights team at Twilio leveraged Apache Kafka to collect data for exploration and alerting. They built a service to monitor bursty traffic, which posed challenges for streaming systems. Through experimentation with Kafka Streams settings, they learned valuable lessons on tuning the system for near real-time alerting. Key takeaways include optimizing RocksDB configuration, polling records, batching operations, punctuators, and partition numbers of input topics. By adjusting these settings, the team improved performance and reduced latency in their application.