How a Global Apparel Brand Scaled OpenTelemetry with Centralized Control and Vendor Independence

Modern Observability Built on Open Standards

Eight years ago, a global apparel brand began modernizing its observability stack using early distributed tracing technologies. As its digital B2B ecosystem expanded, so did the need for deeper visibility across services, APIs, and applications.

Five years ago, the organization made a strategic decision to standardize on OpenTelemetry — the second-largest project under the Cloud Native Computing Foundation after Kubernetes. The goal was clear. Adopt an industry standard that would future-proof observability across platforms and vendors.

All telemetry was consolidated into Elastic (on-premise), creating a unified foundation for correlated logs, metrics, and traces.

But success created a new challenge.

The Challenge: Collector Sprawl at Scale

As the environment expanded to six domains and more than 60 applications, managing OpenTelemetry collectors became increasingly complex.

Configuration changes had to be rolled out across dozens of collectors. Automation was partial. Updates were error-prone. Operational overhead continued to grow.

The team had standardized on OpenTelemetry — but lacked a centralized way to operate it at scale.

The Solution: Centralized Control with Bindplane

The organization adopted Bindplane to serve as the control plane for its OpenTelemetry deployment.

Bindplane introduced:

• Centralized management of the entire collector fleet
• Vendor-independent routing across multiple backends
• The ability to collect once and distribute everywhere

Instead of managing collectors individually, the team could now push changes consistently across environments from a single platform.

Seamless Vendor Migration Without Disruption

During a two-year proof-of-concept and pilot phase, the Global Apparel Brand leveraged Bindplane’s free tier to validate the platform at scale.

This period coincided with a major backend migration — from Elastic On-Premise to Elastic Cloud — while simultaneously routing telemetry to Dynatrace and Amazon Web Services.

The result:

• No downtime
• No data duplication
• No re-instrumentation
• No vendor lock-in

Today, the organization operates with 100% OpenTelemetry observability — fully correlated logs, metrics, and traces across platforms, services, APIs, and infrastructure.

Scaling Beyond the Pilot

As OpenTelemetry adoption expanded across more domains and applications, the company outgrew the free tier. Additional collectors were required to support growth while maintaining the same centralized governance that made the pilot successful.

Bindplane had already proven its value.

Now, it became foundational.

Strategic Impact

Bindplane now serves as the backbone of the company’s observability strategy.

It enables the organization to:

• Collect and transform logs, metrics, and traces from a single control plane
• Maintain full visibility across APIs, services, applications, and infrastructure
• Adapt quickly to evolving business needs
• Scale observability without vendor lock-in

The Bottom Line

Standardizing on OpenTelemetry provided the foundation.

Bindplane made it operational at scale.

By combining open standards with centralized fleet management, the organization transformed collector sprawl into controlled, scalable observability — positioning itself for continued growth without sacrificing flexibility or independence.