How Jimdo Simplified Observability and Cut Costs by Unifying on Grafana Cloud

Jimdo is a website and e-commerce platform headquartered in Hamburg, Germany, empowering millions of small businesses and entrepreneurs to create professional online presences and storefronts with ease. Their platform runs at scale on Kubernetes and serves a global customer base across multiple geographic regions. Jimdo shared their full observability journey on their own blog, and we encourage readers to check out their post for a deeper, behind-the-scenes look.

Challenge

As Jimdo’s infrastructure grew, their fragmented observability stack – spanning Prometheus, logz.io, Honeycomb, and self-hosted Grafana – made incident response slow and complex. Engineers were not only losing hours switching between tools but once they found the issue, they were struggling to correlate metrics, logs, and traces across those disconnected systems. Additionally, high log costs and resulting short retention limits as well as the team’s overall cognitive overload made scaling observability unsustainable.

Solution

Jimdo unified observability by migrating to Grafana Cloud, consolidating metrics, logs, and traces in one managed platform. Key components of the solution included:

Managed, Prometheus-compatible monitoring with long-term retention.
Centralized logging with 30-day retention and the ability to create metrics from logs.
Integrated tracing data, enabling correlation with metrics and logs in a single view.
Streamlined data collection with Grafana Alloy and reduced resource overhead across Kubernetes clusters.
AWS PrivateLink ensuring cost-effective, secure data transfer from clusters to Grafana Cloud.

“Seeing and experiencing the connected observability data in Grafana Cloud feels like we had been living in the stone age before.”
— Bijan Chokoufe Nejad, Senior Staff Engineer

Impact

Migrating to Grafana Cloud transformed Jimdo’s observability, simplifying workflows, cutting costs, and empowering developers with faster insights. Key results included:

Mean time to resolution (MTTR) significantly reduced through unified data correlation.
328% (7 to 30 days) and 1200% (1 to 13 months) increase in retention time for logs and metrics, respectively.
Better ownership, prebuilt dashboards, and improved onboarding for development teams
Decreased operational costs through removal of multiple third-party tools.
Improved scalability and reduced maintenance by replacing self-hosted infrastructure with managed services.
Grafana Labs’ standout support, along with responsive assistance and flexible account limits, enabled Jimdo to test with full production data during evaluation, optimizing their setup without cost concerns.

“Unlike some other vendors, Grafana Labs has a developer-first approach (rather than just satisfying managers) that gave us confidence in this long-term partnership.”\
— Heiko Voigt, Tech Lead