Jago’s Journey towards Scalable APM and Enhanced Observability with Coralogix

Jago’s platform engineering team is responsible for making observability easily accessible for both the infrastructure and software development teams across their cloud environment. Jago used different tools for logging and tracing, and this dual-tool approach led to frequent context switching, which increased the team’s workload and created data silos. The team faced many challenges when they had to monitor external services too. Without a unified view, correlating logs with traces became difficult, limiting their ability to effectively troubleshoot and optimize performance across their Kubernetes applications. More importantly, the high costs associated with their tracing tool constrained Jago’s ability to scale observability in line with their rapid growth. Lastly, the logging tool’s query performance also became a bottleneck for the team, especially as Jago’s log volumes grew.

Owing to these challenges, Jago was looking for a scalable and unified observability platform. A platform that would go easy on their pockets while managing the enormous data ingested daily, providing comprehensive visibility into both application and infrastructure performance. They also wanted a platform that could better align with their open-source preferences as they relied on OpenTelemetry to gather telemetry data from various services and standardize data collection.

The team started exploring various observability platforms and ultimately chose Coralogix with the guidance of their CTO for its competitive costs, open-source support, and full-stack observability features.

Coralogix emerged as the perfect solution for Jago, offering the flexibility to handle large-scale data ingestion while significantly reducing observability costs compared to their previous setup. By offering pricing models that let teams push selected data to low-cost archive storage, Coralogix allowed Jago to ingest far more logs, metrics, and traces than they could with their previous tools, which limited their ability to monitor their expanding infrastructure. The onboarding process was smooth, with Coralogix’s support team assisting Jago in the instrumentation of open-source data ingestion tools like OpenTelemetry for metrics and traces and Fluent Bit for logs.

Coralogix’s full-stack observability platform includes APM, RUM, SIEM, Infrastructure Monitoring, and Log Analytics, providing Jago’s teams with an all-encompassing view of their environment. The APM capabilities, in particular, have been game-changing: Jago’s software developers can now drill down from the Coralogix Service Catalog into problematic services and easily pinpoint latencies, errors, or SLO breaches using multiple views, such as Gantt graphs,  flame graphs, and dependency flows that highlight problematic service down to the span level.

“Coralogix’s APM visualization is superior as it offers an easy drill down from the service catalog into problematic services and traces. Our developers love the built-in correlation to relevant logs as it gives them the details they need to troubleshoot.“

– Quirino Gervacio, Lead of Platform Engineering, Bank Jago

The Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) optimizer feature enables Jago to ingest as much telemetry data as possible without having to hot index all of that data. Jago instead stores 80% of their logs and traces in cloud storage and quickly queries them whenever required, thanks to Coralogix’s Archive Query which is significantly faster than their previous logging tool. This flexibility lets them monitor a wide array of infrastructure and Kubernetes application components, without any compromises or overspending. For the last 1.5 years, Coralogix’s TCO has enabled Jago to manage data at a fraction of their previous costs, empowering them to ingest up to 20TB of data daily without breaking their budget.

Since moving away from its dual-tool approach, Jago has achieved a more scalable, cost-effective, and feature-rich observability solution. With greater flexibility in data ingestion and significantly reduced costs, they can now monitor all aspects of their environment comprehensively. Their teams now have detailed insights across their environment, driving faster troubleshooting and improved service delivery.

Key Benefits:

Broader Observability Coverage for the Same Budget: Broader observability coverage, greater control over indexing, and faster query performance have enabled Jago to monitor more logs, metrics, and traces – something that wasn’t feasible with their previous setup for the same budget. With the help of Coralogix’s TCO optimizer, Jago stores 80% of its ingested data in the inexpensive cloud storage without any indexing, querying them whenever required. This enhanced observability delivers more detailed insights without inflating their observability spending.

Superior Trace Visualization: With Coralogix, Jago’s team can visualize traces using Gantt charts, flame graphs, span node graphs, and service node graphs, allowing for a comprehensive view of service dependencies and interactions. These visualization options surpass the capabilities of their previous tracing tool, enabling faster identification of performance bottlenecks and service issues.

Flexibility and Control with Open Source Support: With Coralogix’s open-source-friendly approach, Jago enjoys greater flexibility and control over their observability strategy. Coralogix enables Jago to integrate open-source tools like OpenTelemetry and Fluent Bit for custom instrumentation, allowing them to tailor their observability setup to match their unique requirements, without any vendor lock-in.

Modern APM – Service Catalog & Database Monitoring: Coralogix’s APM provides Jago with a granular view of service and database health by tracking key metrics such as error rates, latency, query volumes, and failures. Service Catalog helps Jago to monitor and categorize services by performance, allowing their teams to focus on problematic services and optimize resource allocation efficiently. Database Monitoring offers comprehensive insights into database performance and service-database interactions for efficient and rapid troubleshooting.

SLO Monitoring for Service Health: With Coralogix’s SLO monitoring, Jago is now able to track the health and performance of critical services in real time. The platform’s SLO feature offers an immediate overview of which services are meeting their objectives, which are approaching thresholds, and which are breaching limits. This kind of visibility helps Jago prioritize fixes for services impacting user experience.

Data Correlation Across Logs and Traces: Coralogix allows Jago’s teams to seamlessly correlate log and trace data, empowering their engineers to connect detailed logs with trace data to troubleshoot issues more efficiently, and understand the cause behind latencies and errors. By integrating logs and traces in a single platform, Jago now experiences faster insights into root causes, improving their overall response time.

“Coralogix has allowed us to achieve full-stack observability for logs, metrics, and traces, at a cost that previously only covered traces with our previous tracing tool. Coralogix’s built-in cost optimization gives us the freedom to monitor at scale without worrying about the price tag.“

– Adelwin Handoyo, Head of Infra and Platform, Bank Jago

Jago’s transition to Coralogix has transformed their approach to observability, with improved cost management, open-source flexibility, and advanced APM features that enhance service monitoring. With Coralogix’s unified observability platform, Jago’s infrastructure and platform engineering teams now have the tools to maintain optimal performance across their applications, empower their development teams with actionable insights, and manage costs effectively. By enabling scalable, efficient observability, Coralogix has positioned Jago to continue their growth trajectory and remain a leader in Indonesia’s digital banking sector.