Weeks 1–2
Assess coverage
Audited existing telemetry, alert rules, and incident history, and defined service-level objectives for critical customer journeys.
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CASE STUDY · OBSERVABILITY
Full-stack Kubernetes observability with New Relic and Datadog
Unified metrics, traces, and logs across production clusters gave on-call engineers the context to detect and resolve incidents in minutes instead of hours.
Industry
Retail & e-commerce
Scale
8 Kubernetes clusters · 300+ workloads · 24/7 operations
Duration
12 weeks
Service
Observability & Monitoring
79%
faster mean time to resolve
5 min
mean time to detect, down from 45
70%
less alert noise
100%
of production services instrumented
THE CHALLENGE
Where things stood.
Incidents were usually reported by customers first. Engineers pieced together what happened from separate tools, and most alerts were threshold noise that on-call teams had learned to ignore.
Coverage was uneven: some services had APM and tracing, while others had only basic host metrics.
OUR APPROACH
How the engagement ran.
Delivered in phases with a weekly status review and a steering check-in at each milestone.
Weeks 3–6
Instrument
Rolled out New Relic APM and Datadog cluster, container, and log collection across every production cluster.
Weeks 7–10
Signals, not noise
Rebuilt alerting around SLOs and burn rates, created service dashboards, and linked alerts to runbooks.
Weeks 11–12
Operationalize
Trained on-call engineers, set up incident review workflows, and documented ownership for every dashboard and alert.
Technology stack.
Kubernetes
New Relic
Datadog
AWS
RESULTS
Before and after.
Measured against the baseline agreed at the start of the engagement.
| Measure | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Mean time to detect (MTTD) | ~45 minutes | ~5 minutes |
| Mean time to resolve (MTTR) | ~4 hours | ~50 minutes |
| Weekly alert volume | Baseline | 70% lower |
| Services with APM & tracing | ~40% | 100% |
| Incidents first reported by customers | Most | Rare |
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12×
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67%
lower change failure rate
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85%
reduction in monthly cloud spend
96%
of spend allocated to an owner, up from 30%
78%
commitment coverage on steady workloads
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START A CONVERSATION
Planning a similar initiative?
We will walk you through how this engagement was scoped and what it would take in your environment.
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