How Neonomics Improved Reliability and Reduced Costs with Grafana Cloud

Company: Neonomics Industry: Fintech (Open Banking)

Staff Infrastructure Engineer, Csaba Almasi, at Neonomics shares a practical playbook for turning observability into a business case and winning CFO buy-in under real financial pressure. Framed around their migration to Grafana Cloud, this talk focuses less on tooling and more on what actually gets projects approved: translating engineering problems into business impact.

Key Points:

• Great engineering isn’t enough, prove financial impact. Even strong technical proposals fail without clear business value. To get buy-in, engineers must quantify impact in terms leadership understands: cost, risk, and revenue protection.
• Speak the language of the C-suite: risk. Technical details don’t land with executives but risk does. Reframing issues (like latency or observability gaps) as SLA risk, legal exposure, or financial downside is what drives attention and action.
• Answer three questions upfront: what, why, why now. Successful proposals clearly define the solution, justify its importance, and explain urgency, often tied to growing risk or opportunity cost.
• Lead with a strong executive summary. Decision-makers won’t read deep technical docs. A concise, scannable summary that highlights cost, urgency, and risk is critical to getting traction.
• Quantify everything, even imperfectly. From infrastructure costs to engineering time and developer frustration, attaching numbers (even directional ones) builds credibility. Examples included cloud cost breakdowns and internal signals like Slack complaints.
• Tie every risk to a solution. It’s not enough to highlight problems, map each risk directly to how your proposed solution (e.g., Grafana Cloud) resolves it.
• Observability can reduce cost,not just improve reliability. By decommissioning a self-hosted stack, Neonomics eliminated a major cost driver (34.5% of infra spend) and still came out ~15% ahead after adopting Grafana Cloud.
• Reliability gains are measurable and visible. Post-migration, the team saw zero observability-related incidents, improved SLA alignment, and no internal complaints. All clear indicators of both technical and business success.
• Free up engineers for higher-impact work. Offloading observability management allowed a lean infra team to focus on strategic initiatives instead of maintaining unstable systems.

This session offers a concrete blueprint for engineers and leaders alike: how to position observability not as a cost center, but as a driver of reliability, efficiency, and measurable business value.