How IG Group embraced an 'observable by default' culture with Grafana Cloud
Company: IG Group
Industry: Financial Services
IG Group is a global leader in online trading and investment services. Serving over 300,000 clients worldwide, IG offers access to approximately 19,000 financial markets across Europe, North America, Africa, Asia-Pacific, and the Middle East.
Observability challenge
IG Group faced significant challenges with missing and duplicate data sets, siloed data across domain-specific tools, and a lack of visibility into the customer experience. The complexity of their infrastructure — which included a mix of cloud and on-prem systems, plus myriad programming languages, libraries, and other technologies — made it difficult to achieve a unified observability strategy. The organization needed a solution that could democratize data, improve collaboration, and simplify observability for their development teams.
Goal
The observability team’s goal was to implement a platform that correlated all data into a single source of truth, focused on customer-centric insights, and made all applications observable by default — while reducing complexity for developers and improving the developer experience.
Solution
IG Group adopted OpenTelemetry as the foundation of their observability platform, ensuring vendor-agnostic flexibility and standardizing data collection patterns. The company chose Grafana Cloud to play a “central role” in that platform, using Grafana Cloud Traces (powered by Grafana Tempo) for tracing, Grafana Cloud Metrics (powered by Grafana Mimir) for metrics, and various Enterprise data source plugins to build a centralized, scalable platform. This unified view allowed teams across the organization to easily access service health data and correlate it with real user experience. Through a combination of OpenTelemetry collectors and automated dashboards, IG’s engineering teams were able to onboard applications with minimal manual intervention, reducing developer overhead. Standard tags aligned with their CMDB ensured consistency across the board.
Impact
- Improved developer experience: By simplifying the configuration process and shifting to an everything-as-code approach, IG Group significantly reduced the time and effort developers spent on instrumentation. This allowed developers to focus on improving applications rather than managing observability tools.
- Better incident response: The platform provided a consolidated view of metrics, traces, and logs, democratizing data access across teams and breaking down silos. This resulted in faster root cause analysis and more effective incident response.
- Enhanced performance: The shift to Grafana Cloud, combined with OpenTelemetry, allowed IG Group to improve the reliability and scalability of its observability platform, ensuring consistent monitoring of both on-premises and cloud-based services.
- Adoption and cultural shift: Despite initial resistance, IG Group’s focus on creating a learning and feedback culture helped developers embrace observability, moving beyond compliance to true ownership of the platform.
“Grafana Cloud plays a central role in our platform and I’m pleased to say that we’ve built a strong partnership with Grafana over the years. We utilize Tempo as our traces store and Mimir for our metrics… Grafana Cloud also allows us to build our first pane of glass and create a set of standardized dashboards that are accessible to everyone at IG.”
Natalie Ujuk, Observability Technical Lead at IG Group
What’s next
IG Group continues to enhance its observability platform by expanding support for additional cloud services and refining its dashboards-as-code capabilities. They are also exploring advanced real user monitoring with Grafana Faro, a highly configurable web SDK that instruments browser frontend applications.
Conclusion
By embracing OpenTelemetry and Grafana Cloud, IG Group transformed its observability platform, aligning engineering efforts with customer experience. The platform now serves as a single source of truth that empowers teams across the organization, enabling IG Group to scale confidently while ensuring the highest levels of service reliability and performance.
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