How Controlant Achieved 99.99% Delivery Success as a Critical Supplier During COVID-19

In Controlant’s high-compliance industry, there is a lot of emphasis on the collection and processing of data. The team often needs to look at the data related to a specific shipment or logging device as much as weeks or months in the past. They need to maintain access to their logs with rapid response times, but maintaining this amount of data in highly-available indices is incredibly expensive.

Before adopting Coralogix, the DevOps team at Controlant was maintaining large clusters for each of their environments. Although the infrastructure itself was fairly predictable, the clusters were large, at times accounting for up to 54% of all infrastructure spend.

“When we started looking into Coralogix, we were paying as much for the logs as we were for the actual operation of the system, which is crazy.”

On top of direct spend, they had six clusters that needed maintenance, patches, and scaling up or down depending on the circumstances. They were also responsible for providing user support to developers and technical leadership in utilizing the solution. There was quite a bit of toil involved for the Devops engineers.

When looking for a new solution, the team’s first priority was compliance with standards such as ISO27001, SOC2 Type 2, GDPR, and so on. It also needed to be extremely scalable. In the last 2 years, Controlant has needed to scale its operations and data processing capabilities between 10 and 100 fold depending on what metric you’re looking at.

Considering the small size of the DevOps team, they also needed to ensure an easy transition. Not only was the onboarding experience important to them, but feature parity as well. Throughout the migration, and to ensure compliance and fulfill customer requirements, the organization has become reliant on specific capabilities of their observability systems.

Ultimately, the driving motivation for the DevOps team at Controlant to adopt Coralogix was the potential for the platform to meet their observability needs while drastically reducing overhead across the board.

Not only does Coralogix’s fully-managed platform and 24/7 support remove the toil of maintaining their monitoring infrastructure, but by using Coralogix’s TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) Optimizer the team can optimize monitoring costs by allocating high volume compliance data to archive with remote query without ever indexing.

To begin with, the implementation was very straightforward with Coralogix supporting open-source collectors and tooling like Kibana which allowed the team to simply migrate existing workflows and dashboards.

With data flowing into Coralogix, the team immediately saw the logs that the system is generating and began to realize the value of in-stream analysis such as generating metrics from the log data without needing to store the logs.
But the real driving value for the team comes from three key capabilities: power remote query capability for archived data, centralization of observability data from disparate environments, and Coralogix’s world-class 24/7 support.

All of the data that is ingested to Coralogix is parsed and enriched and then stored in Controlant’s Amazon S3 archive bucket. The team can then query those archived logs directly from the Coralogix UI for full control and compliance.

“The Coralogix platform provides us the capability to query archived logs way back in time, and that effectively gives us infinite retention at a very low cost.”

The second thing that is key for the Controlant team is the integration of data from all six environments into a single pane of glass in Coralogix. The data is physically segregated and fully compliant, but from a single control plane the Controlant team can query and correlate data between environments very easily, which is really powerful.

And finally, it was the value of Coralogix’s 24/7 in-app support which is available to all users in the Controlant account. This further offloads work from the DevOps engineers in providing end-user support for creating alerts, investigating issues, and more.

“They’re not just reading a script – it’s real engineers, real competent people, who know the solution in and out, and they provide fantastic support for us.”

Integration with the system was straightforward, with observability data from all environments, and dozens of services, accessible from a single control pane.

With the data flowing into Coralogix, the team is continuously optimizing and reducing the total cost of ownership, taking into account the processing and storage of data as well as the time invested to maintain observable systems.

“Coralogix provides all of this value at a fantastically competitive price, with the ability to meet the scale that we demand of them. It just works.”

With the solution being fully managed and 24/7 support, all of the overhead of maintaining the solution has been offloaded from the DevOps team. The team is now able to invest in further initiatives to boost observability with proactive monitoring, alerting, and benchmarking.