This is cool, thanks for sharing! I'll be honest, I didn't think AOL did anything...interesting...but this is interesting to me! What are some open-source alternatives / analogues to this product?
Compare also to https://enterprise.verizon.com/products/security/advanced-th... (formerly known as Protectwise), which is not open source.
Is it fully about online publications now?
If you are here, you probably care about internet security. Verizon Media runs a pretty significant Bug Bounty program https://hackerone.com/verizonmedia which you can read about here https://www.protocol.com/hackerone-bug-bounty-virtual-verizo... and their blog here https://www.verizonmedia.com/technology/security#/bug-bounty
You might even be looking for a job as an information security professional. You can join "The Paranoids" team (now that's a good name, don't you think!) by checking out some of their jobs. https://www.verizonmedia.com/careers/search.html?q=paranoids
Verizon Media (Engadget, Huffpost, TechCrunch, Yahoo Finance, News Sports etc) are the other big component of the company.
They're an ad network.
Well, there is also https://github.com/aol/ExtJS4-Fart
Of the two, I'm more familiar with Metron (I actually did a small amount of work on it back before it was an Apache project). The core "thing" of Metron was always a large-scale, high-speed packet capture mechanism that would allow you to apply real-time streaming analytics / ML to packet streams, as well as supporting indexing the packets with ElasticSearch for post-hoc retrieval / analysis.
Spot seems to employ some similar ideas, but I haven't dug into it as deeply.