Global Retailer Leverages Bindplane for Streamlined Observability and Monitoring Success

Introduction

As a leader in the retail industry, this retailer faced significant challenges managing a vast array of IT agents across its widespread infrastructure. Tracking these agents, ensuring timely updates, and managing their performance were critical bottlenecks. To tackle these hurdles, they turned to Bindplane, a cutting edge telemetry pipeline with built in fleet management capabilities.

Challenges Faced

• Tracking and managing multiple agents across different environment
• Ensuring consistent performance of their checkout lanes in every store
• Minimizing the operational overhead associated with agent management
• Navigating the "messy middle" of workloads split between on-prem and cloud
• Standardizing observability signals

Goals

• Standardize metric and log collection from on-prem and cloud environments
• Improve MTTR (mean time to respond) for issues
• Preventative issue resolution with observability data
• Reduce the overall cost of observability operation

Solution

Bindplane provided a unified telemetry platform that empowered this retailer to manage agents effortlessly — across more than 20,000 hosts — while offering real-time insights and centralized control over each agent's status, health, and performance.

Standardizing Observability Across Diverse Environments

Faced with the so-called "messy middle", this retailer faced challenges with their split systems between cloud services and on-premises edge devices. Integrating Bindplane became crucial, providing a standardized open telemetry solution.

Recognized by the Retailer

Fleet Management at Scale

Bindplane enabled efficient management of over 16,000 checkout lanes and more than 5,000 backend servers from a unified control panel.

Supporting Legacy Systems

Compatibility was paramount with a sizable infrastructure that still includes legacy systems like SLES.

Cost Reduction

Driven by the need to streamline and save, the retailer saw measurable cost reductions post integration with Bindplane.

Metrics

The team discussed their success using the Bindplane agent to collect logs and metrics from on-prem systems in a standardized way, similar to how Google Cloud Operations Suite functions natively in the cloud. This setup allows them to maintain a single persistence layer for data analysis.

Bindplane has provided a centralized control plane for managing 1,000+ on-prem servers and 16,000 lanes.

They were able to quickly add support for an SLS 11 system used in their pharmacies to the Bindplane agent.

Proactive Monitoring:

Bindplane’s dashboards provide advanced warnings when systems approach their limits, enabling the retailer to take preventative actions.

Exploring Network Telemetry:

The team is currently evaluating Bindplane's capabilities for monitoring network telemetry to maintain superior endpoint-toendpoint connectivity in its hybrid environment.

Prevention:

Bindplane's proactive monitoring capabilities have helped the retailer prevent potential pricing mismatches at the checkout.

70% Reduction in Operational Overhead:

By leveraging Bindplane, the team significantly reduced the time and resources previously needed to manage IT agents manually. This improvement directly translated into cost savings and allowed the IT team to focus on more strategic initiatives.

95% Improvement in Agent Uptime:

With Bindplane's comprehensive monitoring and automated update features, the team achieved a remarkable 95% uptime for all its IT agents, ensuring smooth and reliable operations across its entire IT infrastructure.

The Future is Bright with Bindplane

Looking ahead, the retailer is exploring additional functionalities such as expanded network telemetry, with ongoing discussions on further use cases and improvements. Bindplane's continuous support ensures that new growth areas are on the horizon.

This retailer's journey with Bindplane illustrates a transformative leap in managing IT agents efficiently and effectively. By leveraging Bindplane's powerful features, they overcame its agent management challenges and unlocked new levels of operational efficiency and reliability.

This case study serves as a testament to the strategic value of adopting targeted IT solutions to overcome complex infrastructure management challenges.