Growing observability for IoT-driven, industrial-scale vertical farming with Grafana Cloud

Company: Intelligent Growth Solutions

Industry: Applied Science

Intelligent Growth Solutions (IGS) is a Scotland-based vertical farming technology company that designs and delivers modular, scalable indoor farming systems across the globe. As IGS expanded from small pilot sites to 200-plus tower facilities, its engineering team faced the challenge of achieving unified observability across diverse industrial IoT environments, from physical sensors to cloud-based applications.

Challenge

As IGS scaled its industrial IoT-powered vertical farms from a few towers to sites with over 200—each hosting tens of thousands of sensors—the company faced growing observability challenges. Fragmented tools like Azure App Insights and New Relic created data silos, while a small Platform Engineering team struggled to monitor metrics, logs, and traces across complex hybrid systems. With downtime halting crop harvests and causing costly operational delays to their growing customer base, teams across software development, engineering, and support lacked a unified way to understand and respond to system behavior.

Solution

IGS fully adopted Grafana Cloud as its observability backbone, replacing New Relic and consolidated metrics, logs, and traces into a single, open platform anchored on OpenTelemetry.

Key aspects of the solution:

• End-to-end observability: Unified data collection across physical sensors, PLCs, edge networks, and cloud services using OpenTelemetry, SNMP, and OPC UA.
• Customer alerting: Built natively in Grafana Cloud using infrastructure-as-code and Service Bus integrations. Customer Support teams now manage alerts directly, using the same telemetry their customers see.
• Scale testing: Leveraged Grafana Cloud k6 and TestKube to simulate future-scale conditions — “testing where we expect to be in a year’s time” — ensuring new tower deployments meet performance expectations.
• Shared language and collaboration: Every employee at IGS can access Grafana Cloud, empowering them to create dashboards, investigate issues, and collaborate seamlessly.
• Cost efficiency: Adopted adaptive metrics and logs to reduce costs while expanding observability coverage.

Impact

By unifying on Grafana Cloud, IGS turned observability into a strategic advantage for industrial-scale agriculture. The company now operates with full-stack visibility, from crop sensors to SaaS platforms, while empowering every team to contribute to reliability.

• Unified observability platform reduced tool sprawl and simplified operations.
• Empowered non-software teams to self-serve with alerting and dashboards.
• Accelerated resolution of intermittent connection drops through shared dashboards and eBPF-based tests.
• Improved readiness for future growth and large-scale deployments.
• Lowered observability spend while expanding insight and control.

“We make heavy use of Adaptive Metrics and Adaptive Logs across the board. We've seen that drive our costs significantly down, which is a big thing when it comes to our customers. They measure their success on their profit margins on crop sale. The more we can drive down our OpEx, the better we can do on that.”

— Owen Bower Adams, Head of Platform Engineering