Company: DATEV
Industry: Professional Services
DATEV stands for high-quality software solutions and IT services for tax consultants, auditors, lawyers and companies.
Challenge
DATEV faced major challenges as their systems evolved from on-premises to cloud-based, distributed architectures. Traditional monitoring, which observed systems from the outside, was no longer sufficient in a world of microservices, AI/ML, and containerization. As complexity grew, the company recognized the need to move beyond isolated monitoring tools and foster a cultural shift towards embedding observability into development and operations across all teams.
Solution
To address this, DATEV adopted a modern observability stack built on Grafana Cloud, OpenTelemetry, and Faro for frontend monitoring. They empowered DevOps teams to implement observability-as-code, with separate Grafana Cloud environments tailored to each team. OpenTelemetry became their foundational instrumentation standard, while a maturity model was introduced to measure adoption. They invested in organizational change through enablement resources, documentation, and an internal observability community to promote collaboration and learning.
Impact
- Teams gained autonomy with real-time insights into their own services, improving issue detection and response.
- Cost transparency dashboards helped reduce data sprawl and promoted responsible telemetry usage.
- The organization laid a scalable foundation for future AIOps initiatives, powered by observability data.
“Observability is not just technology—it’s a cultural journey. We’re building a mindset, not just a stack.”
Gunter Geib, Tech Lead for Monitoring & Observability, DATEV
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