Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Azure environments are growing fast, and so are the challenges of monitoring them at scale. In this blog, part of our Azure Monitoring series, we look at how real ITOps and CloudOps teams are moving beyond Azure Monitor to achieve hybrid visibility, faster troubleshooting, and better business outcomes. These real-life customer stories show what’s possible when observability becomes operational. Want the full picture? Explore the rest of the series.

“By the time a pager alerts you to a problem, it’s too late to think about how to manage the incident.”(Google SRE Workbook) Gett, a global leader in urban mobility and corporate travel tech, knew that relying on its incumbent paging system and siloed manual processes for incident management was no longer sustainable. Any delay in response and service restoration could jeopardize customer satisfaction and business continuity.

For large-scale IT organizations, SNMP traps and log alerts are critical, but they can also be a hidden source of technical debt. Over time, alerting systems balloon with noise like redundant conditions, alerts from decommissioned tools, and logic that no longer maps to today’s hybrid infrastructure.

BBVA transformed customer experience and operational insight by using Elastic to unify 45B+ data points across 50+ banking services, with sub-second response times. When BBVA's David Jiménez Ausin looks back at 2014, he sees a very different banking landscape. “Almost everything was still via web channel, as the app wasn't as developed as it is now, and each service had its information in its own systems,” he recalls.

As any good cook knows, if you want to create a top-notch dish, you have to use the best ingredients. So when the engineering team for Cookidoo — an online platform and app that features more than 80,000 guided recipes for the Thermomix, an all-in-one kitchen small appliance — realized the observability tool they were using to monitor the platform wasn’t delivering what they needed, they decided to switch to Grafana Cloud and OpenTelemetry.

Many engineers would agree: migrating to a new observability platform can be a serious undertaking. But it’s also the perfect opportunity to step back, revisit some of the foundational practices that drive your observability strategy — and reap some major benefits, as a result. This was the case at SpotOn, a provider of restaurant point of sales systems and business software, which recently migrated from four disparate observability tools and consolidated on Grafana Cloud.

Xero is a global technology company offering cloud-based accounting solutions designed specifically for small businesses. With engineering teams spread across Auckland, Wellington, Melbourne, and Toronto, managing clear ownership, consistency, and effective collaboration presented significant operational challenges.

In the growing DEX industry, we advocate for a predictive approach to digital workplace management. Build processes and systems around the goal of a seamless employee experience, and you’ll deal with fewer IT challenges as a result. However, even the most well-designed system cannot avoid the inescapable impact of technologies greatest foe: human error – as one of our customers, a global technology leader, recently discovered.

Staying ahead in IT management means embracing innovation. For Global Tech Solutions, a leading managed service provider (MSP), growth came with a challenge: their existing remote monitoring and management (RMM) tool slowed them down.