Optimizing Multicluster Observability and Incident Management for a Semiconductor Giant

A top global semiconductor company, headquartered in Europe with over 50,000 employees, faced challenges managing complex OpenShift deployments across multiple clusters. The Platform Engineering team supported hundreds of developers with varying levels of cloud-native knowledge, using an extensive tech stack of Kubernetes, OpenShift, EKS, Prometheus, Grafana, and Elasticsearch.

Challenges Encountered

Limited Cross-Cluster Visibility: Teams lacked a unified view of multiple clusters, creating challenges in triaging issues and managing incidents across their vast environment.

High Support Demand: Non-Kubernetes-savvy developers relied heavily on the platform team to troubleshoot, creating bottlenecks that limited innovation.

Alert Noise: Unfiltered alerts led to low signal-to-noise ratios, increasing cognitive load for developers and slowing response times.

Security and Compliance Risks: The customer success team needed access to the CLI and control plane for troubleshooting, which posed compliance concerns.

The Solution

Robusta provided the platform team with a one-click rollout solution, empowering developers to self-diagnose application issues and receive alert prioritization enriched with relevant metrics and logs. By adding Robusta’s secure interface, the platform team reduced their MTTR and maintained system reliability without increasing compliance risks. Additionally, Robusta’s cross-cluster observability enabled Christine and her team to gain centralized health insights, enhancing response times.

Robusta offers exactly what they need:

Reduced MTTR and Incident Noise through Prioritized, Context-Rich Alerts: Robusta’s AI-driven alerting system filters and prioritizes alerts based on urgency and relevance, giving each alert context such as historical trends, associated logs, and recent metrics. This contextualized prioritization empowers the team to quickly pinpoint critical issues, leading to faster resolution times (MTTR) and less distraction from minor alerts, enabling faster recovery from incidents and improved system resilience.

Increased Developer Autonomy, Resulting in Fewer Tickets and Faster Release Cycles: With Robusta’s self-service capabilities, developers gain the tools to diagnose and address application issues independently. This shift reduces the volume of support tickets directed to the platform team, allowing developers to troubleshoot without waiting for intervention. As a result, developers work with greater autonomy, moving their projects along at a faster pace, which translates into shorter development cycles and quicker time-to-market.

Enhanced Cluster Visibility Across Clusters, Reducing Cognitive Load and Downtime: Robusta’s centralized dashboard provides a comprehensive view across all clusters, giving the platform team a single source of truth for monitoring the health and performance of their Kubernetes environment. This cross-cluster visibility helps the team detect and address multi-cluster incidents quickly, lowering cognitive load and minimizing downtime. Instead of toggling between multiple windows, the platform team can focus on rapid decision-making and high-level platform improvements.

Improved Security and Compliance with Limited Cluster Access Requirements: Robusta’s secure, role-based access controls allow the customer success team to troubleshoot without needing full access to Kubernetes control planes. By limiting the need for CLI access, the organization maintains compliance with internal security standards, reducing the risk of unauthorized changes or access issues. This feature also ensures that troubleshooting doesn’t compromise platform security, striking a balance between effective incident response and regulatory adherence.

The Outcome

Using Robusta, the semiconductor company successfully scaled its Kubernetes environment without overburdening the platform team, streamlined incident management, and provided a seamless experience for developers across their OpenShift platform. This case highlights Robusta’s ability to optimize multi cluster observability for enterprise-level deployments.