All work
Three monitoring tools became one platform for every team.
The observability platform used by every engineering team at Essent, built on OpenTelemetry.
- Client
- Essent
- Sector
- Energy
- Role
- Observability engineer (SRE)
- Period
- Nov 2024 – Jun 2026
- Status
- Delivered
- How it ran
- Via Team Rockstars IT
3 tools → 1
The situation
Essent’s engineering teams monitored their systems in three places at once: Splunk, Dynatrace and CloudWatch. Most teams shipped logs without deciding what they actually needed to see.
What we built
As one of five engineers on the observability team:
- One platform on OpenTelemetry, with the three backends consolidated onto New Relic. The backend was the organisation’s choice; building on OpenTelemetry keeps the instrumentation portable if that choice changes.
- An organisation-wide OpenTelemetry collector that scales with the amount of incoming data, so the single entry point holds under load.
- A shared AWS CDK building block with observability built in, used by about half of all backend engineers.
- An observability maturity framework, team intakes, and hands-on workshops on OpenTelemetry and SLOs.
What it delivered
More than 15 teams moved from shipping logs to deliberate observability, every engineering team works from the same platform, and the organisation pays for one backend instead of three. The platform is now run by Essent’s own observability team.