Zooplus deploys Elastic Observability to help support pan-European growth

Our furry friends can be fussy eaters, especially if they have special dietary needs. Zooplus, Europe's leading online pet supplies retailer, makes finding the right food, snacks, and toys a breeze, offering more than 8,000 products to customers in 28 countries. With over 25 years of experience, the business has shipped more than 48 million parcels, ensuring pet owners have access to high-quality brands at competitive prices.

Like most online retailers, growth is a priority. Zooplus is expanding operations while balancing pricing, product variety, and logistics efficiency to hit its revenue targets. Customer experience is also critical. Pet owners from Dublin to Dubrovnik expect a consistent experience and fast delivery. Anything less than outstanding service, and customers may take their shopping list elsewhere.

Technology plays a central role in supporting these objectives, and the company has deployed Elastic Observability to ensure that its IT infrastructure is performing efficiently at all times. This includes 2,500 microservices, 20,000 containers, 40 Kubernetes clusters, 600 AWS accounts and using over 70 AWS services. 

"Managing observability at this level requires a centralized platform capable of handling vast amounts of data while providing real-time insights into system performance," says Aram Hakobyan, Platform Chapter Lead for Container Orchestration and Observability at Zooplus. "Elastic manages the scale and complexity of our environment day and night, without interruption."

Zooplus deployed Elastic Observability on Elastic Cloud on AWS. The platform ingests approximately 50,000 logs per second, totaling 2TB of data per day. These logs come from applications, cloud services, and Kubernetes clusters, enabling Zooplus to centralize data collection, correlate events across systems, and rapidly identify potential issues.

Hakobyan says, "Elastic Observability enables a better customer experience by giving our engineering teams deep, real-time visibility into the health, performance, and behavior of infrastructure and applications."

"This allows us to detect issues early — often before our users are impacted — and resolve them faster through root cause analysis and actionable insights, critical in an e-commerce environment," he says.

Importantly, this reliability builds user trust and satisfaction, which directly improves customer retention. During peak usage, Zooplus is able to better scale and allows it to optimize features and performance based on real usage data — helping convert new users through improved experiences.

Scalability is critical to Zooplus' success. With thousands of microservices and containers running across multiple cloud environments, identifying and resolving issues manually wasn't an option. Elastic enables Zooplus to monitor all services centrally, accelerating troubleshooting and reducing pressure on staff.

Standardization has improved operational efficiency. With so many teams and developers working within the platform, Zooplus must enforce consistent collection of logs and metrics. Elastic enables the company to define clear standards and ensure all teams follow best practices. "With Elastic, we enforce structured logging and prevent developers from overloading the system. This ensures efficiency and control," explains Hakobyan.

Storage optimization is another advantage. By leveraging Elastic's data tiering and index lifecycle management, Zooplus keeps frequently accessed data in high-performance storage while automatically archiving older data cost-effectively, reducing disk storage costs between 25% and 50% by indexing data with or without text fields. Additionally, by moving data into searchable archive storage the company has significantly improved storage efficiency, and reduced costs.

Zooplus recently launched its first marketplace in France, enabling third-party vendors to sell their products alongside Zooplus' own offerings. This shift places additional demands on the organization's technology infrastructure, but Hakobyan says that Elastic, which frequently delivers high-quality new features and releases, is ideal for a fast-moving online retailer.

"Zooplus regularly evaluates alternative observability solutions and has consistently found that Elastic offers the best balance of performance, flexibility, and cost. There's never been a reason to switch," he says.

New features include AI-powered observability to further enhance issue resolution and detection. By integrating machine learning capabilities, Zooplus aims to make troubleshooting more efficient and reduce the time spent manually correlating logs and events.

"Elastic is now a critical component of Zooplus' technology stack, providing the insights that support ongoing growth," says Hakobyan. "By offering faster detection and resolution, we can ensure a seamless customer experience while scaling our operations across Europe."

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