UKG's playbook for an OpenTelemetry-powered observability transformation with Grafana Cloud

UKG helps more than 80,000 organizations build great workplaces, delivering AI-powered HR, payroll, workforce management, and culture solutions to millions of people every day. With that scale, the company initially scoped its Grafana Cloud-powered observability transformation for 15 months. The team accomplished it in under four.

In this session, Srikar Mohan, Sr. Manager of Software Engineering, and Christian Kruger, Software Engineering Manager, share how UKG's observability team made that possible by bringing together its engineering, SRE, and support teams and partnering with the Grafana Labs team built a focused delivery strategy. Rather than delivering every capability on day one, they intentionally deferred fast-follow work and set technical guardrails that accelerated delivery without increasing operational risk. Along the way, UKG standardized how metrics, traces, and synthetic monitoring are collected and managed using Grafana Alloy, OpenTelemetry, and observability as code. UKG migrated nearly 7,500 synthetic tests and onboarded more than 25,000 nodes to Grafana Fleet Management. Grafana Professional Services accelerated dashboard and alert migration through AI-assisted conversion, freeing engineers to focus on validation and adoption. 

Whether you're modernizing an observability platform or planning an enterprise-scale transformation, this session gives you strategies for prioritizing capabilities; aligning engineering, SRE, and support teams; and accelerating adoption without sacrificing long-term architecture. Srikar and Christian also share the lessons learned around cross-telemetry correlation, reducing operational complexity and cost.