Company: Vorwerk Gruppe
Industry: Retail/E-Commerce
Vorwerk Gruppe is a German-based company specializing in high-quality household appliances, direct sales, and premium consumer products. Known for its iconic Thermomix kitchen appliance and Cookidoo recipe platform, Vorwerk operates globally with a strong focus on innovation, quality, and customer service.
Challenge
Vorwerk Gruppe faced significant observability challenges with their previous monitoring vendor, Instana. Although Instana provided complex dashboards that initially appealed to leadership, they ultimately proved limiting. The tool’s dashboards lacked flexibility and were difficult to navigate during crisis situations, as critical error details were often buried under multiple layers. Alerts also proved problematic, frequently flagging errors in business logic that weren’t actual system issues.
Solution
In 2021, Vorwerk started replacing Instana with Grafana Cloud and adopted OpenTelemetry as part of their observability overhaul. By leveraging Grafana’s centralized dashboards, Vorwerk implemented consistent logging, metrics, and traces across multiple teams and regions. Because Grafana Cloud is a fully managed platform, Vorwerk’s SRE team no longer has to worry about infrastructure management and operational aspects, such as retention and scaling, and can focus more on optimizing business metrics. Additionally, hands-on workshops and templated setups helped Vorwerk’s early adopters quickly establish best practices across teams.
Impact
- Increased operational efficiency: Grafana Cloud reduced the on-call burden for the SRE team and allowed them to focus on business-critical optimizations.
- Cost optimization: By implementing Adaptive Metrics, a metrics management and cardinality optimization feature in Grafana Cloud, the team reduced overall costs by adjusting data granularity as needed.
- Improved incident response: Automated error markers and alerts allowed for more rapid troubleshooting.
- Support for business metrics: The integration of business data with technical metrics enabled Vorwerk to monitor revenue-impacting indicators like subscription sales and regional performance.
“Migrating from Instana took about 6 months and since adopting Grafana Cloud we have increased our competitive advantage and simplified operations"
Dennis Rippinger, Principal Software Engineer
Conclusion
The transition to Grafana Cloud has empowered Vorwerk’s developers to create meaningful dashboards, simplify monitoring across multiple teams, and leverage metrics, traces, and alerts to improve reliability. As Vorwerk continues to scale, they’ve successfully optimized data ingestion costs with Adaptive Metrics.
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