How an Online Gaming Company Improves Cluster Health & Cost Management with Robusta

Company Overview

An online gambling company with +20 gaming brands in the casino, poker, bingo, sports betting, and scratch card spaces sought a solution to optimize cloud operations and enhance service reliability. With a user base primarily in Europe, maintaining a seamless user experience, especially during major sporting events - was a high priority.

The company hasn't followed a traditional organizational structure, and the SRE model is not in place. Instead, they have a large, active Platform team responsible for managing infrastructure, cloud services, and supporting developers.

The Problem

Service Reliability: A key priority was maintaining 100% uptime during high-traffic events, such as championships and the tournaments. Ensuring end-to-end visibility and cluster health was crucial to avoid outages and disruptions during these peak periods.

Cost Management: Managing the scale of cloud resources while avoiding unnecessary expenses was a constant challenge. Understanding the right moments to scale up or down proved essential for balancing costs and performance.

Information Overload & Visibility: Developers often struggled with insufficient data when troubleshooting, leading to an increased volume of support requests. The existing toolset lacked the unified visibility needed for efficient incident resolution and proactive management of their environment.

The Solution

The company adopted Robusta as their central platform for cloud observability and management, moving from a free tier to a Pro subscription for enhanced capabilities. Key features and benefits they gained include:

Centralized Visibility: Robusta became their "single pane of glass" for monitoring the health of clusters. They rely heavily on the Clusters page to monitor health metrics and drill down into specific issues.

Real-Time Troubleshooting: Robusta enables the team to address incidents quickly, decreasing dependency on external support and reducing the burden on their architecture team. This has led to a noticeable decrease in support tickets.

Enhanced Collaboration: Shifting from single-user access to a collaborative environment, Robusta's RBAC (Role-Based Access Control) features and extended data retention allowed the team to work more effectively across various departments.

Cost Management Insights: The team found value in Robusta's ability to pinpoint opportunities for resource optimization, helping them manage scaling decisions more intelligently.

The Outcome

By adopting Robusta, this online gaming company gained the visibility, collaboration, and cost-management capabilities needed to operate a large-scale, complex cloud environment efficiently. They now handle incidents with confidence, optimize resources, and ensure a seamless gaming experience for their users - even during peak events.

Improved SLA Management: With Robusta's comprehensive view of their environment, the company achieved higher levels of service reliability, especially during critical sporting events.

Operational Efficiency: Architects now stay ahead of incidents, with support tickets significantly reduced. Developers can troubleshoot issues independently, using Robusta alongside existing tools like Grafana and Splunk.

Cost Savings: Robusta's insights into resource usage enabled the company to fine-tune their scaling strategies, leading to better control over cloud spending.

New Dimension of Visibility: Platform team lead, noted that Robusta brought "a new dimension of visibility that they didn't have before," which has been pivotal in improving their overall cloud management.