Infra Monitoring solutions/offerings are available from other vendors. But if I talk about the complete comprehensive Infra monitoring with enterprise-grade observability suite, the capability SolarWinds has, I don’t think some other vendors will have those capabilities
— Somil Goyal, Infra Architect, Pine Labs
ABOUT PINE LABS
Pine Labs is a leading merchant commerce platform known for providing a comprehensive suite of financial technology solutions for merchants, banks, and other businesses. Founded in 1998 and based in India, Pine Labs offers innovative payment acceptance, digital lending, and value-added services to enable seamless commerce experiences.
Pine Labs’ 5,000+ employees provide payment acceptance solutions, merchant services, digital lending, analytics and insights, and e-commerce integration. They have established partnerships with major financial institutions, payment networks, and technology providers to deliver their comprehensive suite of merchant commerce solutions.
CHALLENGE
As businesses continue to undergo technology transformations, Pine Labs has also had to adapt to provide the services and support its customers expect—while facing challenges with its monitoring strategy. Pine Labs began addressing these challenges by adopting open-source solutions to meet the team’s monitoring requirements. However, this wasn’t the solution they were seeking. “There was a bit of customization or tuning required with open source.”
Pine Labs used disparate monitoring tools, such as Paessler ® PRTG® for flow monitoring and Nagios® for services monitoring. Unfortunately, the mixture of tools led to tool sprawl, which inhibited the ability to monitor effectively and lacked the insights the team needed. Pine Labs’ Somil states, “In the existing stack, there was no advanced capability like NetPath monitoring, performance tech monitoring, or API monitoring.”
Effective monitoring is a critical element for Pine Labs due to the widely distributed infrastructure of diverse technologies, ranging from corporate network connectivity to production payment gateway and subsystems environment. Additionally, it has a hybrid server and cloud infrastructure with on-premises data centers with workloads in Azure® and AWS® .
Ravi Khanchandani, Founder of Techsa Services and a SolarWinds Elite partner who assisted Pine Labs with the solution deployment, says, “[Pine Labs’ environment] is a heterogeneous environment, and that is why tool sprawl was really becoming a big challenge that the SolarWinds solution addresses really well.”
Unlike Pine Labs’ previous multiple technology stacks for monitoring applications, the network, and server infrastructures, the IT team needed a comprehensive solution to address all its current monitoring use cases. It also needed to easily integrate with its current setup without requiring a great deal of fine-tuning or customization to provide results. The team wanted to move from strictly monitoring to achieving greater observability across its environment by including a view into the database layer.
“We wanted some kind of advanced solution which will have the overall observability or intelligence in place,” Pine Labs’ Somil states. Pine Labs notes how the observability solution also needed to “...start monitoring or observing the entire environment out of the box. Then, based on that, it can provide some predictions such as capacity analysis predictions [as well as] the bandwidth analysis reports and predictions. We wanted something that can scale better.”
SOLUTION
When researching solution providers, Pine Labs considered several vendors. However, the ability to keep the platform on-premises and scale with Pine Labs as its business needs grew was critical to their choice. ”Other solutions didn’t offer a comprehensive Infra monitoring solution.” Ravi says, “SolarWinds capability to monitor not just the on-prem infrastructure but to scale to the cloud and also integrate the application performance monitoring whenever it’s required” was another critical component when deciding on a vendor.
"There are out-of-box reports that are available, and the kind of reports... is quite amazing... It has all the kinds of logic already available... say I want to do an analysis on which of our VMs are down for quite some time. I can remove and free up the compute."
Additionally, Pine Labs stated how other solutions the team evaluated primarily focused on APM and lacked the end-to-end monitoring the team wanted. Somil says, “The package solution is something that was difficult to get from other vendors compared to SolarWinds, and that was the reason we opted for SolarWinds... When I talk about the infrastructure monitoring, the capability SolarWinds provides, I don’t think some other vendors will have those capabilities.”
Pine Labs chose SolarWinds® Hybrid Cloud Observability for its simplicity as a single solution to provide complete infrastructure visibility, help eliminate tool sprawl and optimize overall costs. Somil states, “Based on our decision metrics, we concluded to go with SolarWinds [Hybrid Cloud Observability] because it had the capability for heterogeneous environment monitoring and out-of-the-box observability.”
BENEFITS
By adopting Hybrid Cloud Observability, Pine Labs has improved the performance of its IT team and increased visibility into its complex infrastructure - all through a single solution. Somil says, “We are now integrating with the SolarWinds Hybrid Cloud Observability platform to address all our specific requirements… in a single stack.” Pine Labs’ Samil states, “We want to ensure the entire environment is being monitored through a single console. We should have complete visibility of the environment.”
"The solution of scaling from on-prem to hybrid infrastructures and also monitoring the application itself is a core requirement of Pine Labs. So basically, all the payment solutions need to be monitored right up to the transaction level. We started off with the infrastructure monitoring part, at least from the on-prem and the cloud infrastructure perspective, but the solution can scale."
Around six tools Pine Labs previously pieced together, including PRTG, Nagios, and other in-house, custom tools, have been replaced with a single solution: SolarWinds Hybrid Cloud Observability. Ravi explains how several SolarWinds features now help the company gain a handle on its environment, “That’s where the need to consolidate and the need to have an end-to-end view of the entire infrastructure and also do the correlation across [our] technologies... so PerfStack, AppStack, and NetPath really help achieve that part.”
The team has also seen additional benefits to choosing Hybrid Cloud Observability and anticipates greater benefits as they continue to work with the product and add components:
- Decreased operating costs: By moving to one all-in-one solution, Pine Labs decreased its operating costs. “Since Pine Labs previously used open-source tools,” states Somil, “The manpower and the time to set up monitoring was quite costly, as compared to now [with SolarWinds]. We do need to pay the licensing cost, but at the same time, we will not have to invest too much in manpower… it’s much more out of the box.”
- Improved MTTD and decreased MTTR: Monitoring from one platform also enabled Pine Labs to perform more efficient issue discovery and resolution – requiring less time from the IT team. Pine Labs’ Somil states Hybrid Cloud Observability has already helped Pine Labs improve its mean time to discovery (MTTD) and reduce mean time to resolution (MTTR) by “at least 15 to 20%.” He anticipates this improvement will continue growing: “In the longer run, we can reduce MTTD and MTTR up to 40 to 50%.”
- Greater visibility: With Hybrid Cloud Observability, Pine Labs can more closely monitor its overall infrastructure and gain improved comprehensive insights into critical areas like device compliance, hop-by-hop analysis, and IP address management all in one solution. Pine Labs’ Somil states, “If there are some stacks of routers and switches [and] they’re impacted with some kind of vulnerabilities, we didn’t have the vulnerability tool for the infrastructure devices.” With Hybrid Cloud Observability, they can now monitor paths and better control their IP assignment. “The path monitoring between our two data centers (DCs), like from DC to disaster recovery (DR) – we wanted to have the historical path monitoring also, which is another benefit... IP addresses were also quite cumbersome to manage, and there was also duplicity... It helped us analyze the overall IP consumption across the environment. So now, we should be able to better control the IP assignment.”
The primary use case for [Hybrid Cloud Observability] is to have broader visibility into the environment... and it’s going to help the entire team itself who needs some kind of visibility when an issue comes in or the visibility in terms of capacity analysis, doing compliance checks, or overall impact analysis in a productive way.
— Somil Goyal, Infra Architect, Pine Labs
Location: India
Year Founded: 1998
Employees: 5,000+
Product Mix:
- SolarWinds® Hybrid Cloud Observability
- Database Performance Analyzer
