How Vanguard used Observability to Accelerate and De-risk their Cloud Migration

Rich Anakor, chief solutions architect at Vanguard, spearheaded an initiative to enhance customer experience by improving the understanding of Vanguard's complex production environment across its engineering teams, despite the challenges posed by transitioning workloads from on-prem data centers to the public cloud. During his 2021 hnycon keynote, Rich explained how Vanguard's existing application performance monitoring approach was inadequate for their evolving infrastructure, leading his team to adopt OpenTelemetry and Honeycomb for better observability. Starting with one service, they gradually expanded their efforts, proving the effectiveness of this new approach by significantly reducing the time required to identify service and data dependencies, which facilitated cultural shifts within the organization. By focusing on day-to-day impacts, such as implementing Honeycomb's Service Level Objectives for proactive issue resolution, they improved customer experience, reduced stress on teams, and decreased overall Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR). This success led to organizational buy-in, with Vanguard mandating the use of OpenTelemetry and Honeycomb across all applications, aiming to replace existing APM tools by the end of 2021, thereby reinforcing the broader adoption of observability practices.