How Wells Fargo rebuilt its observability stack with Grafana Cloud

Wells Fargo embarked on a significant transformation of its observability stack in late 2021, moving away from a complex and outdated system to a more streamlined and efficient setup using Grafana Enterprise and Grafana Cloud. Led by Senior Software Engineering Manager Nikhilesh Tekwani, this initiative aimed to unify observability data, automate alerts, and deliver dashboards to enhance monitoring capabilities. The transition involved overcoming challenges with legacy solutions that were not cloud-ready and required extensive manual work, as well as migrating over 25,000 alert rules to a modern system. By implementing Grafana Agent and Grafana Mimir, Wells Fargo improved data aggregation and visualization, while integrating with platforms like ServiceNow for incident management. Within 10 months, the team achieved significant milestones, including the establishment of out-of-the-box dashboards and increasing active metric consumption significantly. Despite the progress, Tekwani emphasizes that the journey is ongoing, with plans to expand the observability team and continue modernizing their systems.