TeleTracking's path to future-proofing its observability practice with Grafana Cloud

Company: TeleTracking
Industry: Healthcare (HealthIT)

TeleTracking is a healthcare operations platform, empowering hospitals and healthcare systems to optimize patient flow and resource management.

Challenge

TeleTracking was spending excessively on unused telemetry, which hindered their ability to allocate resources effectively. Their engineers struggled with loosely coupled observability tooling that limited their ability to do much beyond incident recovery, which led to missed opportunities for proactive system improvements and operational efficiencies. Additionally, the development teams were creating frontends without adequate observability, making it difficult to diagnose issues and optimize user experiences.

Goal

The team at TeleTracking set out to achieve three distinct things:

Stop spending on unused telemetry
Extend observability beyond basic incident recovery
Stop building frontends without observability

Solution

TeleTracking implemented Adaptive Metrics, a Grafana Cloud feature that helps cut costs by aggregating unused and partially used metrics into lower cardinality versions. Additionally, TeleTracking integrated Grafana Incident Response & Management (IRM) as a consolidated tool for handling post-mortems. This enabled more efficient tracking of incident-driven defects. Their adoption of Grafana Cloud Frontend Observability also played a crucial role in bridging the gap between frontend and backend systems.

Impact

Cost savings and efficiency: By reducing telemetry noise through Adaptive Metrics, TeleTracking reduced their telemetry costs by 50%, allowing them to adopt additional Grafana Cloud features, like Grafana IRM and Frontend Observability.
Enhanced incident management: The use of Grafana IRM streamlined post-mortem processes, helping them identify and resolve incidents more efficiently. This structured approach to incident management also resulted in a more stable platform and a reduced recurrence of similar issues.
Improved user experience: Grafana Cloud Frontend Observability enhanced the team’s ability to visualize user interactions and issues in real-time. This led to quicker responses to user concerns and facilitated a better understanding of the customer experience.
Cultural transformation: The focus on adopting Grafana tools fostered a culture of accountability and ownership among developers. With clear insights and efficient incident management, teams were empowered to take proactive measures, enhancing overall observability maturity within the organization.

“Thanks to 50% savings on our telemetry bill with Adaptive Metrics, we had room in our budget to fund Grafana IRM and now we spend less time on our incident workflow including post-mortems, doing post-mortems efficiently.”
Oren Lion, Director of Software Engineering, Productivity Engineering

Conclusion

Through its partnership with Grafana Cloud, TeleTracking transformed its observability capabilities. The platform not only provided better visibility into system performance but also enabled the company to improve operational efficiency and ensure reliable service delivery, ultimately contributing to better patient care.