Executive Summary

  • Client: A leading FinTech company specializing in digital payments and financial services.
  • Challenge: Rising cloud costs and lack of visibility into resource usage.
  • Solution: Implemented a Grafana, Prometheus, and Loki stack on Azure for monitoring and optimization.
  • Results:
    • 35% reduction in monthly cloud bills.
    • 50% improvement in resource utilization.
    • 40% faster incident resolution with centralized logging and monitoring.

“The Grafana stack gave us the insights we needed to optimize our cloud spend and performance.“

 – CTO, FinTech Company

Client Background

Who They Are

The FinTech company processes millions of transactions daily, serving customers across multiple regions. Their mission is to provide secure, fast, and reliable financial services.

Pre-Challenge State

  • Cloud costs were spiraling out of control due to over-provisioned resources.
  • Lack of visibility into application performance and infrastructure health.

“We were flying blind, with no clear way to track or optimize our cloud usage.“

 – CTO

The Challenge

Pain Points

  1. High Cloud Costs: Monthly Azure bills exceeded budget by 40%.
  2. Inefficient Resource Usage: Over-provisioned VMs and underutilized databases.
  3. Operational Blind Spots: No centralized monitoring or logging for quick issue resolution.

Business Impact

  • Rising operational costs impacted profitability.
  • Delays in identifying and resolving performance issues affected customer experience.

Client Goals

  • Reduce cloud costs without compromising performance.
  • Gain real-time insights into resource usage and application health.
  • Streamline incident detection and resolution.

The Solution

Approach

  • Deployed a Grafana, Prometheus, and Loki stack on Azure for comprehensive monitoring and logging.
  • Conducted a detailed audit of Azure resources to identify optimization opportunities.

Technologies Used

  • Monitoring: Prometheus for metrics collection and alerting.
  • Visualization: Grafana for real-time dashboards and insights.
  • Logging: Loki for centralized log aggregation and querying.
  • Infrastructure: Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) and Azure Virtual Machines.

Key Features

  1. Cost Optimization Dashboard: Tracked cloud spend and resource utilization in real-time.
  2. Automated Alerts: Prometheus alerted teams to over-provisioned or underutilized resources.
  3. Centralized Logging: Loki enabled quick troubleshooting with unified log search.

Implementation Process

Timeline

  • Phase 1 (Audit): 2 weeks of analyzing Azure usage and identifying inefficiencies.
  • Phase 2 (Deployment): 4 weeks to set up Grafana, Prometheus, and Loki on Azure.
  • Phase 3 (Optimization): 6 weeks of fine-tuning resources based on insights.

Team Structure

  • Cloud architects, DevOps engineers, and FinTech’s IT team.

Overcoming Hurdles

  • Integrated the stack with existing Azure services without downtime.
  • Trained the FinTech team to use Grafana dashboards for ongoing optimization.

Results and Impact

Quantitative Metrics

-35%

Cost Reduction

Saved $50K monthly on Azure bills.

50%

Better Resource Utilization

Right-sized VMs and databases.

40%

Faster Incident Resolution

Reduced MTTR (Mean Time to Resolution).

Qualitative Benefits

  • 📊 Improved visibility into cloud infrastructure and application performance.
  • 🛠️ Empowered teams with actionable insights for proactive optimization.

“The Grafana stack transformed how we manage our cloud infrastructure. It’s now cost-effective and efficient.“

 – CTO

Project Snapshot

  • Client: FinTech, Global
  • Project Duration: 3 months
  • Technologies: Grafana, Prometheus, Loki, Azure
  • Key Metric: 35% reduction in cloud costs

“The Grafana stack didn’t just save us money—it gave us control over our cloud future.”

 – CTO, FinTech Company