Company: Fivetran
Industry: Software & Technology
Fivetran helps more than 10,000 customers move data seamlessly from over 600 different sources into data warehouses, data lakes, and beyond. With more than 6 million data syncs per day running across 39 global regions, observability is mission-critical. Their teams – from SREs to engineers to support staff – rely on logs, metrics, and dashboards to ensure customers’ pipelines run smoothly, troubleshoot issues quickly, and deliver the reliability that underpins Fivetran’s promise: data that works as reliably as electricity.
Challenge
As Fivetran scaled, their reliance on New Relic for observability became a growing pain point. Annual contracts came with unexpected and escalating costs, creating budget uncertainty. Meanwhile, log queries slowed to 30 seconds or more, frustrating engineers and slowing down support teams who needed to investigate sync issues in real time. The tooling also felt fragmented, requiring engineers to jump between different systems to piece together a complete picture. With thousands of servers and tens of thousands of pods in play, Fivetran needed a more predictable, scalable, and performant observability solution that could keep up with their rapid growth.
Solution
Fivetran made the decision to migrate from New Relic to Grafana Cloud, setting an ambitious 60-day timeline. A dedicated SRE team led the effort, running both systems in parallel to minimize risk and ensure reliability for customers. The migration was structured but pragmatic: Terraform was used to port alerts and dashboards, redundant metrics and labels were cleaned up, and teams were trained through workshops, office hours, and side-by-side query guides. To ease adoption, Fivetran created clear documentation, ran shared Slack channels with Grafana Labs’ account team, and gave each engineering team ownership of migrating their own dashboards and alerts.
“We solved our [Observability] problems, our cost problems were solved, our pricing and unpredictability were also solved. And now we have a predictable solution and a partner that works well with us and we’re happy with where we are with Grafana Cloud. Not to mention, our support team is happier too.”
– Mike Gordon, VP Platform Engineering, Fivetran
Impact
The migration delivered faster insights, predictable costs, and a stronger foundation for observability at scale.
- 20× faster queries. Log query times dropped from ~30 seconds to ~1.5 seconds, dramatically improving troubleshooting speed.
- Predictable, transparent costs. Eliminated annual contract surprises and brought stability to budgeting.
- Unified observability platform. Logs, metrics, profiles, and dashboards consolidated into a single system, reducing tool sprawl.
- Seamless global migration. Completed in 60 days without disrupting 6 million daily syncs.
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