At Discover, we understand that we need to do more than just earn the trust of customers; we must maintain that trust over time, with every interaction we have. To continue to deliver reliable, always-on technology, we recently moved our entire organization to a new observability platform that enables us to monitor our applications and technology across Discover.
This blog post tells the story of the enterprise-wide migration effort that resulted in:
- 6,100+ new platform users with 2,900 Weekly User Logins
- 2,300+ services migrated
- 13,000 monitored hosts and183,000+ monitored containers
- 10 years of tech debt removed
In addition, with risk always in mind, we were able to strengthen our risk management posture, add end-to-end transaction tracing for on-prem and multi-cloud environments, and reduce Mean Time to Detect (MTTD) and Mean Time to Repair (MTTR).
Impetus for Change
For years, teams at Discover used their own favored tools to monitor the applications and infrastructure they were responsible for. As Discover’s technology footprint grew and became more complex, the Enterprise Systems Management team created a unified, standardized approach to monitoring and alerting that spanned the entire enterprise and enabled more collaboration across teams and departments.
After much research, the team decided to roll out a singular monitoring and observability solution throughout Discover that offered:
- Simplification – Standardizing around a single platform allows Discover to consolidate and decommission outdated solutions and systems for a more streamlined, efficient, and compliant infrastructure ecosystem.
- Automated Monitoring & Alerts – These alerts enabled teams to be notified in near real time of any customer-impacting events so that appropriate measures could be taken well in advance of customers being affected.
- Expanded Scope – Teams monitored more infrastructure with the new tool and received alerts and actionable insights to help teams troubleshoot any potential problems.
Careful Approach to Migration
Undergoing an enterprise-wide migration effort at this scale requires a thoughtful strategy and careful planning.
Three-phased approach to migration
The team decided to methodically roll out the new tool in a phased approach, where they could learn, improve, and pivot, when needed. The three phases were rolled out first across infrastructure teams, then applications, and finally, to the network monitoring solutions.
Tailored migration paths to meet teams’ needs
The Enterprise Systems Management team understood that each team was approaching migration from different starting points, using different cloud services, tools, and the like.
To meet those needs, the team created four, clearly defined paths to migration that teams could follow to move their applications. Teams simply selected the path that most closely aligned to where they were in their observability journey and then followed the prescribed path to migrate.
Ongoing training and feedback sessions
Training was a cornerstone of the migration efforts. Numerous in-person and virtual events were held to walk through the process of migration and to train employees on the new tools and best practices for using the monitoring platform. Additionally, teams could join weekly office hours and ask questions specific to their exact tools, applications, and infrastructure.
Transparency
Public dashboards that tracked where teams were in their migration journey added a layer of transparency that helped to keep teams accountable for their work and helped us track the entire migration process across the enterprise.
Conclusion
The migration to a new observability and monitoring platform was a significant success, enabling Discover to streamline its infrastructure, enhance monitoring capabilities, and improve risk management. With over 5,700 users and 2,200+ services migrated, the company has effectively removed eight years of tech debt and achieved substantial cloud savings. The careful planning and phased approach to migration ensured that teams could adapt and learn throughout the process, leading to a more efficient and transparent transition. Overall, the migration has positioned Discover to continue delivering reliable and always-on technology, maintaining the trust and confidence of its customers.
