How SailPoint charted a course to cost efficiency with Grafana Cloud

Company: SailPoint
Industry: Software & Technology

SailPoint is the global leader in identity security, offering a premier platform designed to manage and secure access to applications and data. Trusted by some of the world’s most complex and sophisticated enterprises, SailPoint’s solutions safeguard against identity-centric cyber threats while driving operational efficiency and enabling seamless business transformation.

Challenge

The company’s hypergrowth led to an overwhelming volume of telemetry data, placing strain on their Prometheus-based observability system. Despite initial success with Prometheus and Grafana, they reached limits with scaling, leading to performance issues and rising maintenance costs. SailPoint’s engineering teams were spending an increasingly prohibitive amount of time managing their observability platform, diverting resources from higher-priority initiatives.

Goal

Sailpoint’s goal was to achieve scalable, cost-effective observability with minimal maintenance while improving performance and gaining more control over metric management.

Solution

SailPoint initially adopted Cortex to horizontally scale their observability platform and consolidate Grafana dashboards across regions. However, as performance bottlenecks and maintenance complexity grew, the team sought alternatives. After evaluating options through their internal DACI decision-making framework, SailPoint chose Grafana Cloud for its scalability, positive customer references, built-in support, and reduced maintenance overhead.

More specifically, Grafana Cloud’s Adaptive Metrics and cardinality management dashboards were instrumental in reducing metric volume, allowing SailPoint to focus only on metrics that provided real business value. The transition resulted in a 50% reduction in active metric series—from 75 million to 37.5 million.

Impact

• Cost efficiency: Grafana Cloud proved to be more cost-effective than Grafana and Cortex OSS
• Reduced maintenance: By offloading maintenance to Grafana, the engineering team freed up time to work on critical business initiatives, such as collaborating with other teams on reducing cardinality at the source.
• Improved performance: Grafana Cloud’s performance optimizations allowed SailPoint to continue scaling without sacrificing observability capabilities.
• Metric reduction: SailPoint’s use of Adaptive Metrics enabled them to reduce unnecessary telemetry data, significantly lowering their active metric count while continuing to grow their platform.

“Grafana Cloud really hit on cost. It was actually cheaper for us to run in Grafana Cloud than in open source.”

Omar Lopez, Head of Observability

What’s next

SailPoint is exploring additional Grafana Cloud features, such as k6 and Synthetic Monitoring for performance testing and Asserts to enhance their monitoring capabilities.

Conclusion

By transitioning to Grafana Cloud, SailPoint significantly reduced their observability overhead, enabling their teams to focus on more strategic priorities. The move has also increased scalability, reduced costs, and empowered SailPoint’s engineers to optimize observability across their growing platform.

Speakers

Omar Lopez

Head of Observability

SailPoint

Omar Lopez

Head of Observability  •  SailPoint

Omar Lopez is the Head of Observability at SailPoint. When he’s not tackling observability challenges, he enjoys spending time with his family and watching soccer (Go USMNT!).

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