Company: Booking.com
Industry: Travel
Booking.com is one of the world’s leading digital travel companies. Their mission is to make it easier for everyone to experience the world.
Challenge
Booking.com’s proprietary observability stack, which consisted of multiple observability solutions, served well for over a decade, but couldn’t support the company’s shift to multi-cloud and hybrid cloud infrastructures. The platform’s fragmented telemetry, redundant storage, and complex tooling led to resource inefficiencies, higher costs, and a steep learning curve for new team members. The legacy system also made it difficult to adopt open observability standards or change vendors. Maintenance of custom libraries added to the burden, increasing engineering toil across the organization.
Solution
The team unified and future-proofed their observability strategy by migrating to Grafana Cloud. They integrated Grafana’s centralized telemetry pipeline using OpenTelemetry, which simplified data gathering and enabled vendor-agnostic monitoring across environments. For metrics and logging, Booking.com deployed Grafana Cloud Metrics and Grafana Cloud Logs. For profiling, they implemented Grafana Cloud Profiles, which provides real-time visibility into application performance. To streamline operations, the team also introduced observability-as-code practices to automate dashboard creation and alerting, promoting consistent monitoring across teams.
Impact
- Improved scalability: Grafana Mimir and Grafana Loki manage over 85 million metrics, supporting Booking.com’s growing data needs across multi-cloud environments.
- Cost efficiency: Transitioning away from costly legacy tools, like AppDynamics, reduced operational expenses while maintaining flexibility in vendor selection.
- Enhanced team productivity: Centralized observability tools minimized time spent on infrastructure management, allowing engineers to focus on higher-priority projects.
- Data-driven decision-making: Profiling data has helped the team enhance both customer experience and application performance.
“The reason we chose Grafana Labs is because they align with our strategy — they natively support OpenTelemetry, and we want to work with somebody who built a product born in the cloud, for the cloud.”
Murugesan Ramaiah, Solutions Architect
Conclusion
In modernizing their observability platform, Booking.com more closely aliged strategy with business needs, ensuring each technological change supported their mission. By fostering a transparent, supportive environment, the team adapted smoothly to new tools and processes. Embracing scalable, vendor-agnostic solutions like OpenTelemetry also future-proofed their observability infrastructure, setting them up for long-term success.
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