Company: Erste Digital Industry: Financial Services
Erste Digital is the technology arm of Erste Group, one of the largest banking groups in Central and Eastern Europe. Operating in a highly regulated environment, Erste Digital supports a vast and complex IT landscape spanning legacy systems, on-prem infrastructure, and multiple cloud providers. The team is responsible for keeping mission-critical banking services reliable, secure, and compliant at all times.
Challenge
Erste Digital needed a way to unify observability across a highly fragmented, legacy tool-heavy environment while meeting strict compliance and security requirements. Hundreds of teams were operating in silos, running more than 250 Grafana open source instances backed by many different data sources, which slowed incident response and limited visibility. At the same time, the organization wanted to avoid vendor lock-in and adopt open, future-proofed standards.
Solution
Erste Digital adopted Grafana Cloud as the foundation for a vendor-neutral, OpenTelemetry-based observability platform.
- Standardized instrumentation using OpenTelemetry SDKs to enable vendor-neutral data collection across teams and environments
- Deployed Grafana Alloy and a centralized internal telemetry gateway to securely collect and route telemetry in a regulated environment
- Consolidated metrics, logs, and traces using Grafana Cloud Mimir, Loki, and Tempo into a single managed platform
- Reduced tool sprawl by migrating hundreds of Grafana instances and diverse backends into one unified Grafana Cloud environment
- Democratized access to observability data by enabling teams to build dashboards, alerts, and shared views across organizational boundaries
“We wanted to have a vendor neutral instrumentation and therefore we chose Grafana Cloud." - Markus Langer, Senior Technology Specialist
Impact
With Grafana Cloud in place, Erste Digital transformed how teams and leaders access, share, and act on observability data.
- Established a single place where teams can find metrics, logs, and traces, improving incident response and decision-making
- Enabled real-time visibility for management through dashboards used for service health, capacity planning, and SLO monitoring
- Reduced onboarding time for new teams and services from weeks to just a few days
- Improved cost predictability by consolidating tools and gaining better control over data ingestion
- Drove cultural change by breaking down silos and encouraging teams to share data and collaborate
“We now have a single place where everyone goes and finds his information. Metrics, logs, traces.” - Markus Langer, Senior Technology Specialist
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