Fragmented Logs to Full Visibility: A Leading Insurance Company’s Journey with ElastiFlow

From Logging Silos to Clarity

A solutions architect at a leading insurance company was tasked with identifying gaps in its enterprise architecture and developing innovative solutions to bridge them. The team functions much like an enterprise architecture group, ensuring that the technology remains efficient, cohesive, and forward-thinking. 

One of the largest challenges the company faced was a highly fragmented logging environment. With disparate tools scattered across different parts of the organization, managing and making sense of the data became increasingly difficult. 

The Challenge: A Siloed Logging Environment

The insurance company managed its network with a mix of legacy tools, virtual private cloud (VPC) flow logs, and custom-built logging stacks, each designed for specific teams and applications. However, without a unified view across on-premises systems, remote offices, and cloud environments, operational inefficiencies quickly emerged.

IT and application teams faced challenges correlating network activity, leading to longer troubleshooting times and an increased reliance on the cloud platform team for incident resolution.

Discovering ElastiFlow

The solutions architect first discovered ElastiFlow through a colleague who was familiar with its strong reputation in the network observability and open-source community. Recognizing its potential to address the company’s fragmented logging infrastructure, the solutions architect decided to explore the platform further. 

After reviewing the documentation and running initial tests, it became clear that ElastiFlow was the solution they had been searching for. 

ElastiFlow’s ease of implementation and immediate value, delivered through intuitive, out-of-the-box dashboards, set it apart from the competition. Unlike the company’s legacy systems, which were cumbersome and lacked accessibility, ElastiFlow provided unmatched flexibility and scalability tailored to the company’s needs.

The Impact of ElastiFlow

Implementing ElastiFlow helped the cloud platform team overcome silos, speed up troubleshooting, and make network insights easily accessible across all of the organization’s teams. The results included:

Unified Logging Across Environments

Before implementing ElastiFlow, the organization struggled with siloed logging systems. ElastiFlow allowed them to centralize VPC flow logs, on-premises network flow logs, and other critical data sources into a single, unified environment. This provided a comprehensive view of the organization’s network activity, breaking down operational barriers and streamlining network observability.

Reducing Time to Resolution

Previously, the cloud platform team was often the first point of contact for troubleshooting network issues, even when the root cause was outside their domain. By implementing ElastiFlow, they empowered teams across the organization to investigate network issues independently. This significantly reduced the burden on the cloud platform team and accelerated incident response times.

Cost Flexibility and Scalability

ElastiFlow’s cost-effectiveness was another key advantage. Unlike other solutions that locked the organization into rigid pricing models, ElastiFlow provided the flexibility to adjust the volume of flows collected, scale up or down as needed, and optimize costs efficiently. This ensured the network logging solution could evolve with the organization’s needs without excessive financial strain.

Empowering Teams with Data

By democratizing access to network and flow log data, ElastiFlow transformed how the insurance company’s teams troubleshoot and analyze network issues. With centralized access to these logs, teams could take ownership of their investigations, fostering collaboration and reducing reliance on the cloud platform team. This shift not only improved operational efficiency but also enhanced cross-team communication.

What’s Next for the Team? 

Looking ahead, the cloud platform team is exploring ways to integrate application data with network logs to gain deeper insights into system performance. By correlating application performance with network activity, they aim to enhance their observability strategy and continue to improve troubleshooting. Additionally, the team sees potential in leveraging a modern pipeline service to stream VPC flow logs more efficiently, further optimizing the company’s infrastructure.

Simplifying Complex Network Environments 

The insurance company’s experience with ElastiFlow has demonstrated its ability to simplify complex network environments, reduce troubleshooting time, and provide a scalable, flexible network logging solution. 

The transition to ElastiFlow has allowed the company to overcome initial challenges and establish a streamlined, efficient approach to network observability. For organizations struggling with fragmented network log data and operational inefficiencies, ElastiFlow offers a powerful solution to unify and optimize observability strategies.

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