How Delivery Hero migrated 2,000+ users to Grafana Cloud and reshaped observability at scale

Company: Delivery Hero

Industry: Retail

Delivery Hero is one of the world’s largest online food ordering and delivery platforms, operating across 70 countries with 11 brands, 3 million riders, and over 1 million restaurants. From Berlin to Seoul to Buenos Aires, the company manages complex, independent tech stacks and teams across its global brands.

Challenge

With multiple brands using different observability tools like New Relic, Datadog, and Grafana – Delivery Hero lacked a common diagnostic language. Each brand operated in its own silo, with disconnected data and unpredictable costs. Engineering teams struggled to collaborate or share capabilities globally. The company needed a unified, cost-predictable observability platform that could scale across 3,000+ engineers and enable cross-brand collaboration.

Solution

Grafana Cloud became the foundation for a global observability migration anchored on OpenTelemetry. The project unified metrics, logs, and traces while making observability sustainable and developer-friendly.

• Grafana Cloud provided a single pane of glass for all 11 global brands, connecting teams across regions.
• OpenTelemetry replaced vendor-specific SDKs, simplifying data collection and ensuring vendor neutrality.
• Grafana Labs’ Professional Services supported automated data and dashboard conversion from legacy systems.
• Grafana Mimir enabled scalable metrics ingestion for 20+ petabytes of time series and logs.
• Application Observability, Adaptive Telemetry, and Cost Attribution dashboards helped optimize usage, prevent runaway costs, and empower local teams to manage their data efficiently.

“We did accomplish a lot with this migration. We were able to get everyone into a single pane of glass. Engineers in South America can now talk to engineers in Berlin or Korea and so on. Everybody uses the same system.”

– Andy Howden, Engineering Director

Impact

The migration to Grafana Cloud transformed Delivery Hero’s observability across technical, operational, and financial dimensions.

• Reduced observability costs from 15–25% of its total cloud spend to ~6%, creating predictable budgets.
• Unified observability across 11 brands and 70 countries, fostering cross-team collaboration.
• Improved developer efficiency through shared dashboards, alerts, and automations.
• Simplified management of petabytes of logs and metrics through OpenTelemetry-based standardization.
• Increased innovation speed as teams now reuse best practices and observability patterns globally.

“We’re overwhelmingly in a better position than when we started. We were able to deliver on the project goals and meaningfully reduce our cost.”

– Andy Howden, Engineering Director