Instant availability of logs and real-time observability analytics
With Elastic Observability, the team has moved away from constant firefighting and waiting long hours for log ingestion and data transformation. Real-time access to critical application performance data from logs, APM, and analytics ensures that disrupted services are back online as soon as possible.
Reduction in MTTD and MTTR
With Elastic Observability, the corporation has cut the mean time to detection and resolution.
Accelerated release of new software
Elastic Observability delivered a sophisticated platform to help the corporation "shift left" for its completely re-architected microservices-based applications, enabling DevOps to test and fix bugs before release to operations.
Unlocking faster development cycles and reducing MTTR: How Elastic Observability streamlines a Fortune 500 multinational conglomerate corporation's cloud operations
This advanced technology corporation specializes in aerospace technologies, industrial automation, building automation, and energy and sustainability solutions. Its software division helps customers accelerate the digital transformation of data to support better decision-making and business performance.
In recent years, the software business has moved from an on-prem environment to Microsoft Azure, running hundreds of microservices orchestrated by Kubernetes. The corporation's senior software engineer manager says, "The move to a completely microservices-based architecture required a more sophisticated observability platform in order to identify issues and ensure that disrupted services are back online as soon as possible."
The senior software engineer manager also wanted to better support the corporation's DevOps team, where the software cycle is undergoing a "shift left" to address most of the testing and bug fixes before releasing to operations. "We wanted to provide real-time analytics and observability services to the customers who use our platform," he says.
Troubleshooting in real time
The corporation began by addressing the need for a faster, more comprehensive logging database so that information is readily available for engineers and developers to troubleshoot and build new software releases. "We started off using an open source version of Elastic as a logging store," says the senior software engineer manager. "But we moved to Elastic Cloud on Azure to reflect the transformation of our own architecture, enabling us to revamp log ingestion into Elasticsearch clusters."
As part of its Elastic Observability deployment, the corporation takes advantage of Elastic APM to monitor software services and applications in real time, as well as Elastic Agent, which enables the collection of logs, metrics, traces, availability, security, and other data from each host in a single, unified way.
The senior director of cloud engineering and product operations says that Elastic Observability is a key enabler of the corporation’s strategy to deliver more value through technology. As the observability platform matures, they’ve been able to increase productivity and troubleshoot issues as they arise.
"The greatest value we get from Elastic is that it minimizes customer downtime and strengthens their loyalty to our corporation."
Taking the heat off engineers
Elastic Observability has also reduced pressure on engineers tasked with identifying root causes and resolving issues. The senior software engineer manager says, "We've moved away from constant firefighting and waiting long hours for log ingestion and data transformation. Now, logs are always available with real-time data analytics that pinpoint the issue with incredible accuracy. It's a huge win for the business."
The senior software engineer manager gives the example of an IoT device that stops sending data. "With Elastic Observability, we can determine when it's a site-specific issue or an issue with the wider application. These insights help improve both our mean time to detect (MTTD) and mean time to respond (MTTR) across both product and customer operations."
Building on this success, the corporation plans to expand its use of Elastic solutions. It already uses Elasticsearch and is exploring the potential of Elastic Security to support its cybersecurity operations.
The senior director of cloud engineering and product operations says, "The Elastic team has been a fantastic partner on our journey. We went from learning how to leverage the software to collaborating with Elastic on how to leverage an enterprise-level platform across other divisions, including Software."
