Company: C Spire
Industry: Telecommunications
C Spire is a privately-owned telecommunications company headquartered in Mississippi, delivering innovative services across three main divisions: Wireless, Home, and Business. As C Spire scaled, engineering faced challenges managing disconnected monitoring and logging tools, highlighting the need for a cohesive observability strategy.
Challenge
C Spire’s observability was fragmented across multiple siloed tools—AppDynamics for APM, LogicMonitor for metrics, and Splunk for logs. This disjointed setup led to inconsistent observability, difficult cross-team correlation, high CPU overhead from Java agents, expensive licensing, and the need for near-constant manual maintenance.
Solution
To break down these silos, C Spire consolidated onto Grafana Cloud, taking advantage of the out of the box features to power their full stack observability, including:
- Application Observability with OpenTelemetry and Grafana Alloy allowed auto-generation of request, error, and duration metrics, alongside rich trace context.
- Unified metrics, logs, and traces: With consistent tagging and automated instrumentation, teams could traverse observability data seamlessly.
- Automated deployment: The team enabled rapid, uniform rollout across thousands of VMs and services via Ansible.
- OnCall Alerting: Using the OnCall features as part of Grafana Cloud IRM—a single, label-driven alert rule now manages alerts across the entire fleet—intelligently routing incidents to the right team’s phone without manual intervention.
Impact
- Widespread observability adoption: 95% adoption across C Spire’s App Dev teams, spanning over 1,000 service/VM combinations—all achieved alongside regular development work.
- Performance improvement: 30% reduction in CPU usage by removing the Java agent from AppDynamic and replacing it with the OpenTelemetry Java agent.
- Operational efficiency: Deployment-wide observability updates completed in 30 minutes with Grafana Alloy, Ansible, and OpenTelemetry—down from days of manual, service-by-service work in AppDynamics.
- Faster incident response: Unified dashboards, streamlined on-call workflows, and root-cause trace insights accelerated triage and resolution.
“Grafana Cloud’s Application Observability finally 100% sold us on moving to cloud — it gave us request, error, and duration metrics automatically, something we never had before.”
Zachary Sistrunk, Software Developer III
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