Company: SpotOn
Industry: Software & Technology (Hospitality, Retail/PoS systems)
SpotOn is a technology company that provides point-of-sale and business management solutions tailored for small and medium-sized businesses. As the company scaled, its engineering teams faced increasing complexity in monitoring and managing their distributed systems, necessitating a more cohesive observability strategy.
Challenge
SpotOn’s observability footprint was fragmented amongst 4 different tools, leading to inconsistent telemetry data and siloed information across infrastructure, Kubernetes, and application layers. This lack of standardization made it difficult to correlate logs, metrics, and traces, hindering effective incident response and root cause analysis. The absence of a unified tagging system further complicated alerting and monitoring efforts, resulting in inefficiencies and increased operational overhead.
Solution
To address these challenges, SpotOn transitioned from their an observability solution that was spread across 4 disparate proprietary tools to a centralized, Grafana Cloud observability platform. In order to make the transition easier and their future state better, SpotOn also implemented a standardized tagging taxonomy across all of their systems, enabling consistent data collection and easier correlation of their entire fleet observability signals. They adopted OpenTelemetry with custom SDKs to enforce telemetry standards, integrated Grafana Cloud Application Observability (including RED metrics and frontend monitoring), and deployed Grafana Cloud IRM to streamline incident management.
Impact
- Millions in savings: By using consolidating their observability footprint from 4 different tools onto Grafana Cloud and then deploying Adaptive Metrics on top of it, SpotOn saw lower costs across the board
- Decreased MTTR: Streamlined incident response management with Grafana Cloud IRM meant quicker root cause analysis and faster remediation.
- Engineering cultural change: By adopting of OpenTelemetry, implementing their new global tagging taxonomy, and deploying Grafana Cloud IRM, SpotOn was able to turn away from a culture of Git-blame and usher in a period of increased developer satisfaction
“Because of those foundational dashboards, we stopped asking engineers to create dashboards that included CPU memory and things like that. Those [technical details] became just baked in. Now, product and sales teams can look at these dashboards and quickly answer questions around what’s working and what’s not“
Jeremy White, VP Engineering
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