How Loblaw Unified and Streamlined Observability Across 2,500 Stores with Bindplane

Executive Summary

Loblaw Companies Limited, Canada's largest retailer operating 2,500 stores nationwide, faced significant challenges with legacy monitoring solutions scattered across thousands of endpoints. By adopting Bindplane, an OpenTelemetry-native telemetry pipeline, Loblaw centralized monitoring and drastically simplified management across their diverse infrastructure, improving operational efficiency and paving the way for future scalability.

About Loblaw

Loblaw operates an extensive retail landscape, including 1,100 grocery stores and 1,400 Shoppers Drug Mart locations. With approximately 25,000 endpoints, their infrastructure spans legacy systems like SUSE 11 and Windows 7, alongside newer platforms like Rocky Linux and OpenSUSE.

Challenges: Fragmented Monitoring and High Overhead

Loblaw's existing monitoring infrastructure—split across BMC TrueSight for Unix environments and Microsoft SCOM for Windows—created significant operational challenges. Deployment and configuration were labor-intensive, relying heavily on manual modifications to a library of Ansible playbooks and domain-specific configuration. Additionally, monitoring was fragmented, making it challenging to observe thousands of endpoints efficiently.

Solution: Unified Telemetry with Bindplane

Loblaw selected Bindplane and OpenTelemetry to consolidate its diverse monitoring tools into a unified telemetry pipeline. Key benefits included:

• Centralized Management: Simplified monitoring of 25,000 endpoints with the help of Bindplane’s library of remotely deployable OpenTelemetry configurations.
• One-Click Deployment: Drastically reduced time and complexity, replacing manual Ansible playbooks with streamlined, automated deployment.
• Process-Specific Monitoring: Enhanced visibility into critical processes like Cortex, Palo Alto, and database workloads, utilizing a single collector type.
• Minimal Overhead: Significantly reduced ongoing maintenance demands, freeing SRE resources for strategic initiatives.

Implementation: A Scalable Telemetry Pipeline

Loblaw’s new observability pipeline leveraged Bindplane for collection, routing data seamlessly into platforms like Google Cloud Logging, Victoria Metrics, Prometheus, and Clickhouse, and visualization via Grafana dashboards. Specific monitoring use cases included:

• POS Workstation Performance: Continuous performance tracking at critical retail endpoints.
• Security Resource Monitoring: Observing resource impact of tools like Cortex and anti-malware solutions.
• Custom Log Collection: Capturing detailed logs from applications and specialized scripts (e.g., PIN pad checks).

Results: Operational Efficiency and Streamlined Management

Bindplane enabled Loblaw’s SRE team to deploy and manage telemetry at at scale with reduced complexity. Highlights included:

• Rapidly deployed OpenTelemetry Collectors across its retail stores, standardizing monitoring.
• Simplified infrastructure monitoring significantly reduced manual efforts and overhead.
• Standardized Telemetry provided critical, process-specific insights, enhancing the reliability and security of operations.

Future Plans: Expansion and Integration

After a successful rollout in retail stores, Loblaw plans to extend Bindplane's implementation to pharmacy environments, followed by potential expansions into SAP and supply chain systems. Bindplane is also looking into expanding its alerting capabilities, integrating with PagerDuty and ServiceNow to reduce reliance on multiple alerting tools.

Customer Quote

Strong Vendor Relationship

Loblaw highlighted exceptional support experiences with the Bindplane team, particularly regarding legacy system integration, positioning the partnership as a foundational component of their ongoing observability strategy.