Grafana at scale on Azure: How Backbase deploys customer stacks in minutes and empowers users to turn business data into faster decisions

Company: Backbase

Industry: Financial Services

Backbase is a global leader in digital and AI-powered banking software, serving banks, credit unions, and financial institutions worldwide. Its Engagement Banking Platform unifies customer and employee experiences from digital onboarding and retail banking to lending, investing, and assisted service, helping banks deliver seamless, customer-centric journeys. Headquartered in the Netherlands, Backbase supports financial institutions across North America, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia-Pacific.

Challenge

Backbase launched its managed hosting product line to offer banks a fully hosted, secure, and compliant version of its engagement banking platform on Microsoft Azure. As the business scaled to 70+ hosted banks, the team needed deep visibility across thousands of Kubernetes workloads and Azure services to maintain 99.9% uptime SLAs and compliance requirements. Their previous observability setup was complex, manual, and costly with limited automation for single sign-on, log filtering, or cross-environment visibility, and poor support for multi-tenant isolation and customer-specific configurations.

Solution

Backbase unified its observability on Grafana Cloud, integrating monitoring, alerting, cost optimization, and analytics into one automated platform.

• Grafana Alloy + Kubernetes Monitoring Helm Charts: Simplified observability setup and scaling across 70+ customer environments, with modular configurations for application and infrastructure monitoring.
• Azure Integration (Cloud Provider Observability): Automatically ingests Azure Monitor metrics and logs into Grafana Cloud, converted to Prometheus format for unified visualization.
• Grafana Cloud Logs + Event Hub Pipeline: Centralized, filtered log ingestion through  Loki Forwarder, removing unnecessary logs while preserving compliance.
• Grafana Cloud Adaptive Metrics: Optimized telemetry and resource costs, automating right-sizing decisions via Terraform.
• Centralized Grafana Stack: Created a single pane of glass to monitor all customer environments in real time, essential during global cloud outages or incidents.
• Granular aAccess Ccontrols (RBAC + Label-based): Enabled secure collaboration between Backbase and its banking customers while maintaining strict isolation.

“Grafana Cloud fits perfectly into our ‘automate everything’ strategy. It gives us control over costs, avoids surprises, and integrates seamlessly into our workflows.”

– Andrei Drumov, Systems Engineer

Impact

Migrating to Grafana Cloud has transformed how Backbase manages and scales observability for its managed hosting customers.

• Achieved full-stack visibility across infrastructure, apps, and Azure services, supporting 24×7 uptime and DR readiness.
• Reduced operational complexity and manual effort through automation with Terraform, Helm, and serverless telemetry flows.
• Improved cost efficiency via log quotas, Adaptive Metrics, and OpenCost insights, preventing runaway telemetry expenses.
• Enhanced customer trust and transparency with data-driven dashboards and centralized status views across global banks.
• Strengthened partnership with Grafana Labs, benefiting from rapid feature delivery and ongoing technical collaboration.

“We can’t deliver 99.9% SLAs for 70 banks without proper observability. Grafana has been exceptional, both the product and the partnership.”

– Manu Chadha, Product Director