Introduction

Imagine driving a high-performance car without a dashboard. You wouldn’t know if your engine is overheating or if something unexpected is happening under the hood. For fintech startups like Infinity, which operates a cross-border banking application, observability is that crucial dashboard. With every transfer and transaction at stake, your company needs an observability solution that provides complete, actionable insights. Infinity discovered that a unified view of logs, metrics, and traces is not just nice to have; it is essential for maintaining security, performance, and high availability.

Understanding Observability

Before diving into Infinity’s journey, let’s cover the basics of observability:

• Logs: These are the diary entries of your system. Every significant event is recorded—like “User X initiated a $500 transfer at 3:00 PM.”
• Metrics: Think of these as numerical snapshots that capture system performance, such as “API response time is 200ms” or “CPU usage is 60%.”
• Traces: These create a map of how requests travel through your services. For instance, a trace might show how a transfer request flows from the Auth Service to the Payment Gateway, then to the Database, including the time taken at each step.

For Infinity, having these details was crucial. Their application needs to be reliable 24/7, ensuring every cross-border transaction is secure and efficient. Therefore, the path to 360° observability is essential.

Challenges

Even though observability is vital, you face significant hurdles in implementing it, especially as an early-stage startup. For developers, jumping around in CloudWatch logs and AWS X-ray introduces unnecessary context-switching, which leads to slower debugging and decreased productivity.

Cloudwatch (logs and metrics) and X ray (traces) even though they are both AWS products, are billed separately leading to fragmented and unpredictable billing. And, for startups, to obtain full-stack observability from tools such as Datadog the costs just do not satisfy the objective. Just have a look at the price comparison chart of different observability tools in the market from small to large enterprises.

How Osuite helped

After Infinity moved to Osuite,

1. Their monitoring costs were reduced by 10x. Legacy tools like New Relic and Datadog can rack up charges into the thousands of dollars. As our system has no extra fees for data ingestion, custom metrics, or additional user seats, Infinity drastically optimized its cloud monitoring costs, transforming into a super saver in an era of skyrocketing SaaS pricing.
2. Their MTTR dropped by >50%. ( This is an estimate from their productivity boost reports)
3. They found key bottlenecks and improved the latencies of their important endpoints by >30%. 

 

Not just that, Infinity’s Data never leaves their servers, enhancing security. By using our on-premise solution, the sensitive data never leaves their infrastructure, therefore this means it's a big win for fintech startups such as Inifinity for being more compliant with their customers' data and maintaining better industry practices.

Infinity was able to start using our solution in less than 72 hours with our  100% instrumentation support, which led them to supercharge their debugging productivity.

The Transformation

1. Predictable pricing, through one simple bill.
2. Enhanced security, through the on-premise solution.
3. Epic productivity, via rapid debugging

If you feel some of the pains Infinity did (fragmented and expensive observability), and if this story resonates with you, we would be more than happy to get on a call and understand your monitoring needs.

 

Links:

• Infinity | Business banking for cross-border SMBs & Startups