Company: Flipside Crypto
Industry: Web3 / Blockchain Data & Analytics
Flipside powers blockchain analytics and ecosystem growth by ingesting, curating, and serving on-chain data across multiple networks. Its infrastructure spans revenue-critical RPC nodes, blockchain validators, and data pipelines that feed analytics workloads in Snowflake for customers worldwide.
Because validator uptime directly impacts both customer trust and company revenue, Flipside treats observability as a day-one requirement. Managing availability, alerting, and incident response across decentralized blockchain infrastructure is essential not only for system reliability, but for sustaining Flipside’s business model and enabling data-driven growth across Web3 ecosystems.
Challenge
Flipside Crypto operates critical blockchain infrastructure—RPC nodes and validators—that directly powers its data platform and revenue model. Any downtime has immediate consequences: customers lose access to fresh blockchain data, and Flipside loses validator rewards in real time.
Early on, observability wasn’t optional—it was a day-one requirement. But as a small team with limited budget, Flipside faced difficult tradeoffs between cost, reliability, and operational complexity. Their initial open-source monitoring stack delivered visibility but became increasingly hard to maintain, especially around alerting consistency, long-term metrics storage, and on-call workflows.
Running and maintaining the observability system itself was becoming a risk to the infrastructure it was meant to protect.
Solution
Flipside standardized on Grafana Cloud as its unified observability platform, building on the team’s existing Grafana expertise while removing the operational burden of managing the monitoring stack.
Using Grafana Alloy, Flipside collects metrics from workloads running across bare metal and Kubernetes and streams them into Grafana Cloud for visualization, alerting, and long-term analysis. By consolidating metrics, alerts, routing, and incident response into a single platform, the team eliminated the “split-brain” alerting model they previously experienced with separate tools.
Key components of their solution include:
- Grafana Cloud Metrics for centralized observability
- Adaptive Metrics to automatically reduce unused series
- Grafana IRM to manage alert routing, escalation policies, and incidents end-to-end
- A standardized severity and urgency labeling model to reduce alert fatigue and improve trust in on-call notifications
This approach allowed Flipside to move from maintaining tooling to focusing on system reliability and business outcomes.
“Management now knew, “If I want to look at something, I go to Grafana because that’s where everything is.”
— Ryan King, Senior Solutions Engineer
Impact
By moving to Grafana Cloud, Flipside achieved measurable improvements across cost, reliability, and operational clarity:
- 32% reduction in metrics costs by automatically removing unused series with Adaptive Metrics
- Improved on-call trust through consistent alert classification and routing
- Reduced operational risk by eliminating the need to self-manage critical monitoring infrastructure
- Faster incident response and clearer communication using Grafana IRM’s incident management features
- Organization-wide visibility, with Grafana as the single source of truth for observability
Most importantly, Flipside reached a point where system health is no longer a constant question—alerts now reliably indicate real issues that require action.
“We had no idea which metrics we needed and which metrics we didn’t need… with Grafana Cloud [Adaptive Metrics], it turns out you don’t need to. That meant getting 32% of our metrics that we weren’t using at all off our billing.”
— Ryan King, Senior Solutions Engineer
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Looking Ahead
With day-one alerting and incident management firmly in place, Flipside is now focused on day-two observability optimizations. This includes expanding service-level views using the Grafana Service Center, tracking reliability with SLOs, and enriching alerts with additional on-chain context.
By embedding observability deeply into both engineering workflows and stakeholder communication, Flipside is positioning Grafana Cloud as a foundational platform—not just for monitoring infrastructure, but for confidently scaling its blockchain data business.
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