How Ocado enables smarter, business-centric observability with Grafana Cloud and OpenTelemetry

Company: Ocado

Industry: E-commerce / Logistics

Ocado Technology powers the Ocado Smart Platform (OSP), an end-to-end, robotics-driven e-grocery solution spanning e-commerce, supply chain, highly automated fulfillment, and last-mile delivery. Originating in the UK, Ocado now serves 12+ global retail partners across North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia, operating at massive scale with thousands of apps and billions of daily business events.

Challenge

Rapid growth left Ocado with a fragmented observability landscape: 13 tools from 7 vendors, multiple in-house systems, closed-source agents, and surging data volumes. This created architectural complexity, operational fragility, unsustainable costs, and developer friction. Engineers had to context-switch across UIs, slowing incident response and driving up MTTR.

Solution

Using open standard, and the internal Ocado Technology Platform (OTP) plus FinOps and “OT Data” to automate, govern, and measure the migration, the team consolidated their observability platform on Grafana Cloud. 

• Grafana Cloud Metrics: Replaced New Relic metrics/APM; standardized on Micrometer & OpenTelemetry for open, portable instrumentation.
• Grafana Cloud Logs: Fluent Bit sidecars ship logs directly to Loki; automated rollout per environment enabled >50% adoption in 24–48 hours, nearing full adoption within 2 weeks.
• Grafana Cloud Traces: Added distributed tracing so engineers can troubleshoot across services in one place.
• Grafana Faro & Grafana Cloud k6: Expanded signal coverage with real-user monitoring and load testing under the same platform.
• Grafana Cloud IRM (in progress): Ongoing migration from PagerDuty to unify incident response with the rest of observability.

“We've done market research, ran a bunch of tests, trials, proofs of concept and concluded that Grafana Cloud could be a provider that satisfies all our needs. So all that was left was to actually migrate from all the previous vendors to Grafana"

– Mirek Wierzba, Engineering Director

Impact

Consolidation improved reliability, speed, and cost control while reducing cognitive load for engineers.

• Simpler, more reliable architecture: Fewer moving parts for platform teams to run and scale.
• Significant cost savings on key services, with clear levers to manage and optimize spend going forward.
• Faster troubleshooting & lower MTTR: All signals in one place mean less tool-hopping, quicker path from alert to root cause.
• Developer velocity & empowerment: Engineers leverage a common toolkit (dashboards, queries, ML-powered alerts) instead of firefighting across tools.
• Future-proofed stack: Eliminated closed-source agents; standardized on OpenTelemetry + Micrometer + Grafana for flexibility.

“Having all signals in one place is much easier and convenient for users… we empowered our engineers to be more proactive rather than reactive firefighting.”

– Mirek Wierzba, Engineering Director