Case Study
Beverage giant integrates 16 disparate platforms with UST’s Applied Observability solution, speeds error detection by 75%
OUR CLIENT
As a global leader in the food and beverage industry, this company operates in over 200 countries with a portfolio of renowned brands, including beverages, snacks, sports drinks, and breakfast foods. With a strong commitment to innovation and sustainable growth, the company continuously evolves to meet consumer demands while focusing on long-term stakeholder value.
THE CHALLENGE
Fragmented platform monitoring prevents rapid issue identification and resolution
The company faced significant operational challenges as it attempted to manage multiple technology platforms across its diverse business lines. The complex landscape of platforms and tools offered little standardization, severely limiting performance and insights to help IT leaders make informed business decisions. The company’s challenges included:
- Siloed systems—Each platform operated independently, with its distinct monitoring tools and methodologies, resulting in a fragmented view of overall system performance. IT leaders could not easily gain insights about system health.
- Reactive monitoring—The systems lacked formal service commitments, such as service level indicators (SLIs) and service level objectives (SLOs), leading to inefficiencies and an inability to identify and resolve issues proactively.
- Cumbersome dashboards—The company had limited dashboard capabilities, preventing IT teams from viewing holistic data to troubleshoot and optimize platform performance. This caused operational delays and increased downtime.
With these combined challenges, the company needed a strategic partner to help centralize and standardize its approach to platform maintenance and enhance insights to boost reliability and performance across its vast application portfolio.
THE TRANSFORMATION
UST’s Applied Observability framework provides critical data and actionable insights
The beverage giant partnered with UST to implement a standardized, centralized observability solution to streamline platform maintenance. UST’s Applied Observability framework delivered a comprehensive approach to gain observable data and actionable insights for faster issue response and proactive decision-making. The solution included:
- A centralized monitoring solution—Prometheus and OpenSearch integrations enabled comprehensive data collection, insightful analysis, and real-time issue alerting across critical tools, allowing the company to proactively identify potential errors and performance bottlenecks before disruptions could occur.
- Observability standardization—Clearly defined SLIs and SLOs across tools helped set visibility standards and gave IT leaders a "single-pane-of-glass" view of the company’s application portfolio to better maintain system health.
- Customizable persona-based dashboards—UST leveraged pre-built Grafana components from the UST PACE platform to create dynamic, customizable dashboards for 11 of the platforms integrated into the new centralized monitoring system. These dashboards offer IT teams clear insights, accelerating issue resolution, minimizing downtime, and boosting system reliability.
This tailored solution delivered a comprehensive approach to technology platform monitoring with holistic visibility to improve performance management.
THE IMPACT
Accelerated issue identification by 75% and boosted IT productivity by 50%
Once the observability monitoring solution was in place, the beverage giant experienced a paradigm shift in its operations and achieved these impressive improvements:
- 75% faster issue identification—IT leaders had data-driven visibility to detect errors, latency problems, and traffic saturation, improving system reliability and uptime.
- 50% reduction in human effort to trace and isolate issues—This massive increase in productivity enabled the IT team to focus on higher-value operational tasks.
- 16 platforms integrated into the centralized observability system—In just six months, the company's approach to platform management became more efficient, significantly reducing operational disruptions, empowering the company to respond swiftly to system issues and driving greater reliability across its technology landscape.
RESOURCES
https://www.ust.com/en/what-we-do/strategy-implementation-operations