Brotherhood Mutual strengthens technology reliability with Elastic Observability

For more than a century, Brotherhood Mutual Insurance Company has served a niche area of the insurance industry by focusing specifically on churches and related ministries. From local congregations to schools, colleges, camps, and mission organizations, the company is a leading provider of innovative risk management resources and specialized coverage for property and liability, auto, mission protection, and workers' comp to ministries that anchor communities across the U.S. Through their Brotherhood Works™ brand, the company also works with more than 7,000 ministries for payroll services, health benefits solutions, and more.

Technology plays a key role in supporting Brotherhood Mutual's operations, from systems used by underwriters and claims teams to the company's digital presence. Juwuan Stewart, Manager of DevOps, leads the team responsible for supporting these platforms. His philosophy is straightforward: when technology runs smoothly, teams can stay focused on their work and the company mission of serving the Church.

"When technology runs in tip-top shape, your team runs in tip-top shape," Stewart says. "The goal is to support the people inside the organization with the best tools possible, so they can ultimately deliver better service to internal and external customers."

As the digital environment grew, Brotherhood Mutual's IT team looked for better ways to clearly view systems and activity. The security team, which had a positive experience with Elastic in the past, suggested adopting Elastic Observability on Elastic Cloud to gain centralized, scalable visibility across its environment.

Today, Elastic Agents run on servers in production and development environments, collecting logs, metrics, and traces. The goal was not more data, but to help the DevOps team monitor dozens of applications from internal systems to digital sites with the flexibility to scale, streamline ingestion, and transform unstructured data into actionable insights without adding operational overhead.

As Brotherhood Mutual expanded its systems, monitoring and alerts became a central focus.

Using Elastic, the DevOps team built dashboards that surface meaningful metrics instead of noise. These dashboards give teams a real-time view into application health, error rates, and system performance, making it easy to understand what is running smoothly and what requires attention. Stewart estimates that support tickets have decreased by about 20%.

"Elastic allows us to be automated in keeping watch, which means our team can identify and resolve more issues before they even surface for the users of those systems," said Stewart. "We can spend our days on more valuable work, supporting more technologies for teams and customers. To me, that's a win."

Application performance monitoring (APM) also helps Brotherhood Mutual identify and resolve deeper performance issues.

Brotherhood Mutual's relationship with Elastic has been collaborative, proactive, and highly supportive. As log volumes grew, the DevOps team worked closely with Elastic architects to optimize deployment. One benefit for the company involved reducing storage costs while maintaining performance and retention requirements.