Fintech Platform Cuts Logging Costs 52% While Boosting Scale and Reliability

Fragmented observability creating hidden costs

The company had successfully used Chronosphere for metrics and tracing since 2022, achieving 99.994% platform uptime and reducing observability costs by 70%. However, their logging infrastructure remained siloed in a self-hosted Elastic stack. This fragmentation wasn’t initially seen as problematic, but over time, several “paper cuts” accumulated into significant operational challenges.

Financial pressures were mounting

• Logging costs were projected to reach $38M by 2028, with expenses growing linearly alongside data volume. At $0.25 per transaction for observability, these costs threatened the company’s ability to scale profitably.

Operational overhead consumed valuable engineering time

• The Cloud Operations Team spent hours manually scaling Elastic during peak events. This time could have been invested in higher-value initiatives. Even more concerning, the team experienced 10 preventable Elastic incidents in 2024 alone, undermining their availability goals.

Developer productivity was suffering during critical moments

• When customer-facing incidents occurred, engineers faced a frustrating 25-second delay
  transitioning between Chronosphere and Elastic systems. This context switching slowed mean time to resolution (MTTR) and created unnecessary cognitive strain precisely when clarity and speed were most critical.

Unified observability platform

The company’s strong relationship with Chronosphere, built through years of successful metrics and tracing collaboration, opened the door to reconsidering their logging strategy.

When Chronosphere Logs was announced, the team agreed to evaluate consolidating their entire observability stack.

The company replaced their self-hosted Elastic infrastructure with Chronosphere Logs, creating a unified platform for logs, metrics, and traces. This consolidation eliminated infrastructure maintenance overhead while providing granular cost controls that had been impossible with their previous setup.

Immediate and measurable impact

Operational resilience improved dramatically

• The recurring Elastic incidents that had plagued the team throughout 2024 became a thing of the past. With Chronosphere’s proven 99.99% uptime, the risk to revenue and customer experience from observability infrastructure failures was eliminated. The operational team reclaimed hours previously spent on Elastic maintenance each week, while the quality and actionability of alerts improved substantially.

Developer efficiency soared

• System transitions that previously took 25 seconds are now completed in 1-2 seconds —
  a 96% improvement that dramatically reduced MTTR and eliminated developer frustration during critical incidents.
• “We measured the transition time from metrics and traces in Chronosphere to our prior vendor’s disparate system. Then we compared that to having metrics, traces, and logs within Chronosphere’s observability platform and Chronosphere was 96% faster. It was just really fast and a great developer experience, which was really our corporate focus.”

Costs dropped significantly while scalability increased

• The company achieved a 52% reduction in projected logging costs. Per-transaction observability costs fell from $0.25 to $0.08, and the platform demonstrated 3x better scalability than their previous Elastic setup.

Building on success

The unified observability platform has positioned the company for continued rapid scaling while maintaining operational excellence. With all telemetry data in a single, cohesive system, they’ve eliminated the complexity and cost overhead that previously threatened their growth trajectory.

The success has strengthened the partnership between the fintech platform and Chronosphere. Most importantly, the engineering team can now focus on innovation and customer experience rather than infrastructure maintenance. They are confident that their observability foundation will scale with their ambitious growth plans.