How a Retail Powerhouse Transformed Telemetry Ops with Bindplane

Executive Summary

A major global retailer with hundreds of locations worldwide and billions in annual revenue faced substantial challenges with fragmented and costly observability and security telemetry management. By adopting Bindplane, an OpenTelemetry-native Unified Telemetry Pipeline, the retailer unified telemetry collection, significantly reduced operational costs, and enhanced security across its expansive IT landscape.

About the Retailer

The retailer operates a complex IT infrastructure spanning on-premises systems and multi-cloud deployments (Azure and Google Cloud). It manages roughly 45TB of telemetry data daily across various platforms, including Windows, AIX servers, OpenShift, and Cisco VOIP.

Challenges: Fragmentation, High Costs, and Security Gaps

The retailer's previous solution, based on legacy systems, resulted in significant operational and financial challenges:

• High Licensing Costs: Teams incurred unsustainable costs, amounting to millions annually in Splunk licensing costs.
• Operational Silos: Fragmented visibility led to inconsistent logging standards and inefficiencies; vastly different telemetry costs across team
• Complex Infrastructure: Struggled to scale telemetry collection effectively across diverse environments, particularly Azure Event Hub and legacy systems.
• Deployment Issues: Manual and error-prone agent deployments caused frequent delays and operational setbacks.
• Security Blind Spots: cost-driven volume constraints led teams to make tough decisions and retain critical telemetry data.

Solution: A Unified Telemetry Pipeline with Bindplane

The retailer implemented Bindplane to unify and simplify telemetry collection, achieving significant operational improvements:

• Centralized Telemetry Pipeline: Integrated telemetry streams from Azure Event Hub, AIX servers, OpenShift containers, Cisco VOIP systems, Windows, and macOS endpoints into a centralized observability framework.
• Cost Optimization: Transitioned log storage and analytics to Google Cloud Logging and SecOps, dramatically reducing licensing fees, and overall costs.
• Enhanced Security: Standardized and automated log parsing/tagging, reduced overalls, enabling teams to collect all the necessary data to eliminate security blindspots.
• Simplified Deployment: Adopted a single OpenTelemetry collector across all platforms, drastically reducing deployment complexity.
• Scalable Infrastructure: Designed a horizontally scalable architecture for ongoing and future telemetry management.

Implementation Status

The retailer's Bindplane deployment is advancing quickly:

• Deployed on approximately 54,000 Windows desktops and over 11,000 servers (AIX, Linux, Windows).
• In H2 2025, aiming to scale beyond 100,000 agents and eventually manage telemetry for over 1 million global devices.

Impact: Cost Savings, Efficiency, and Improved Security

The retailer achieved immediate and significant operational benefits:

• Immediate Cost Savings: Saved $1.5 million immediately upon workstation standardization, projecting an additional $1.5–2 million annual savings post-rollout.
• Operational Efficiency: Reduced annual agent management hours by 10,000 ($1.5 million), redirecting resources to strategic, value-adding activities.
• Reduced Storage and Ingestion Costs: Achieved savings by pre-filtering and removing unnecessary data before ingestion.
• Eliminated Security Blind Spots: Provided comprehensive visibility and accelerated threat detection and response.
• Streamlined Operations: Simplified agent management and maintenance, significantly enhancing operational productivity.

Customer Insights

"Standardizing our workstations on the OpenTelemetry Collector gave us an immediate $1.5 million savings. Once complete, we anticipate saving another $1–2 million annually across servers, AIX, and domain controllers."— Senior Platform Engineer

"We're saving 10,000 hours annually on agent management alone. That valuable time is now redirected to value-add tasks."— Infrastructure Lead

"Bindplane is the best vendor partnership we've experienced—delivering exactly as promised, on schedule, without forcing us into disruptive changes."— Security Architect.

Building a Foundation for Future Growth

With Bindplane, the retailer addressed immediate operational and financial challenges and created a robust platform for future innovation. As the retailer scales its telemetry initiatives globally, Bindplane will continue to provide unified, efficient, and secure observability and telemetry solutions.