Cost-efficient and open observability: why Ocado migrated to Grafana Cloud

As Ocado Technology’s grocery platform grew to include 12 retail partners worldwide, its observability system became overly complex and costly, utilizing 13 tools across 7 vendors. This fragmented setup led to operational inefficiencies, requiring engineers to frequently switch tools and interfaces to troubleshoot issues, which slowed down response times and increased costs. In response, Ocado consolidated its observability tools onto Grafana Cloud, choosing it for its open-source standards and cost-efficient governance features. By migrating from New Relic to Grafana Cloud, Ocado streamlined its architecture, improved cost savings, and enhanced troubleshooting speed with centralized logs, metrics, and traces. The transition involved using OpenTelemetry and Micrometer for metrics instrumentation and Fluent Bit for logs, which facilitated a swift adoption process with most applications migrating within two weeks. Despite initial challenges, the migration empowered Ocado’s engineers with a unified toolkit, enabling proactive monitoring and future-proofing their observability strategy. Ocado continues to explore further optimizations, such as integrating incident response into Grafana Cloud, marking the migration as a strategic move towards operational efficiency and scalability.