Company: Dutch Tax Office or The Belastingdienst
Industry: Government
The Belastingdienst is the government organisation responsible for imposing and collecting taxes on behalf of the state, and implementing various allowances and schemes for Dutch residents.
Challenge
Before implementing Grafana, the Dutch Tax Office faced a major observability challenge: fragmented monitoring across a wide range of platforms and legacy tools like IBM and BMC made it difficult to gain a unified view of system performance. Their teams struggled with limited data accessibility and high costs, prompting a multi-year effort to find a scalable solution with open standards that could centralize observability and support application performance insights across their complex IT environment.
Solution
To solve their fragmented and costly observability setup, the Dutch Tax Office launched a formal tender process and selected Grafana’s LGTM stack in 2023, with OpenTelemetry support and full on-prem deployment to meet strict data sovereignty requirements. The implementation was structured as a centralized service for internal teams, featuring multi-tenancy by business domain, strong intake controls, and self-service onboarding powered by Grafana Alloy. To balance scalability and licensing costs, they created a hybrid setup combining enterprise and open source Grafana clusters, enabling shared dashboards and insights across teams while keeping generic telemetry outside the enterprise licensing footprint.
Impact
- Improved reliability and visibility: Teams now have centralized access to logs, metrics, and traces—enabling faster root-cause analysis and performance improvements, especially with tracing and profiling insights.
- Scalable, hybrid architecture: By combining Grafana Enterprise for application-level observability with an OSS stack for generic telemetry, they optimized licensing costs while maintaining flexibility and visibility across chains.
- Team empowerment and self-service onboarding: Custom tooling (LGTM Automate) and Alloy examples allowed internal teams to onboard quickly and independently, accelerating adoption to over 250 active users.
“The stack is very stable and reliable for us. It’s all on premise, but it’s working very good. No crashing, no performance issues, so we’re very happy with that.”
- Frank van Herpt, Product Owner Monitoring, Belastingdienst
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