At Opsdis every day is about observability, so when Cind AB last year contacted us and asked if we could help them to improve their monitor solution we were excited. Cind AB is a Swedish company that is using innovative 3d camera technology to measure volumes of different kinds of objects. This can be truckloads, parcels passing on a conveyor belt etc.
Cinds customers are distributed around the world so the monitoring solution must be distributed and deployed on the Cind equipment located at each customers site. The challenge Cind wanted to solve was to get a monitor solution that did not require their ops team to log into each customer site and check the status of processes or grep through log files to track down issues and especially get notified about issues before the customer.
Part of the initial monitoring requirements included:
- Monitor health and state of key system process
- Monitor health and state of cameras
- Gather logs
In addition, the deployment of the distributed monitoring should be completely automated with Ansible to get simple and homogeneous deployment on all customer sites.
The monitoring solution that we developed utilized the stack of Prometheus, Loki and Grafana. On each customer location a Prometheus instance is deployed with a number of bespoken and standard exporters to collect metrics. For logs we use promtail to scrape log files and to create metrics from log files. Both logs and metrics are pushed to a central solution, currently using Grafana Cloud. Using a central storage for metrics and logs give a powerful insight into each customer and the overall health of the systems. Prometheus based alerting enable the operation team to work more proactive to problems that occur. Dashboards provide insight to Cind’s developer, operation team and business where they can get an overview state of each customer on a world map and drill down to site details. Overall the solution brings insight to the operational environment, without manual work and a better customer experience.
With the monitoring stack in place, Cind AB can easily grow their needs with additional customers, more metrics and analyse large volumes of log data. Using Grafana enables future integration of additional metrics and log data sources.
“Working with Opsdis gave us a complete new insight into our customers’ sites and the state of the operations”, says Marcus Schelin, CEO at Cind. “Now we have an automated observability platform with metrics and logs that we can continue to build on”
Find some of our observability services here and don’t hesitate to reach out to discuss observability with us.