Reduces MTTR by 25%
With Elastic, the company has reduced MTTR by 25%, improving operational efficiency and minimizing business impact.
Lowers observability costs by 35%
The business reduced the cost of its observability activities by 35% with Elastic, as the Elastic Platform proved more cost-effective than the old Application Performance Monitoring (APM) product and Application Logs Collection.
Accelerates deployment of generative AI features
With Elastic, it has a clear roadmap for cutting-edge AI adoption including anomaly detection, automatic log parsing, and pipeline creation.
A leading gas distribution company, deploys Elastic Observability to monitor the connectivity of millions of smart meters, reduce MTTR, and ensure regulatory compliance.
Italy's leading gas distribution company is focused on supplying millions of customers nationwide. In addition to maintaining the performance of its portion of the gas distribution network, the utility company is mandated by regulators to collect and share consumption data with gas sales companies to ensure accurate billing.
To help achieve this goal, the company's digital innovation arm has rolled out an IoT (Internet of Things) platform that manages over eight million smart meters across Italy. These devices, normally installed in a customer's property, transmit usage data and other information back to the business.
Elastic Observability is critical in enabling the business to measure multiple activities and quickly identify the root cause of any issues relating to its infrastructure, applications, and partner systems. The cloud infrastructure architect within the company's digital innovation department says, "Maintaining 99% uptime for our IT infrastructure using Elastic Observability ensures that the connection with the meters is stable, that helps us avoid possible penalties."
Due to the high cost and complexity of its previous observability solutions, the business migrated to Elastic in 2023. With the assistance of its digital consulting partner, it has now consolidated all application logs, firewall logs, and load balancer logs into Elastic Observability running on Elastic Cloud.
"With Elastic, we can enhance root cause analysis by efficiently filtering logs, analyzing traces, and detecting APM errors. This has enabled us to reduce MTTR by 25%."
Solving problems quickly with data
One of Elastic's strengths is its versatility. Some internal line-of-business (LOB) teams now use Elastic dashboards to monitor critical connectivities, such as field devices availability. This includes IT personnel, operational staff, network management, and smart meter operations.
The cloud infrastructure architect gives an example of end-users having difficulties operating web pages in a business application. Because the problem happened at seemingly random times and on different web pages, the team set up a synthetic monitor that browsed those pages and captured the different errors thrown when execution stopped.
"Combining the data of the synthetic monitor with errors from Elastic APM, we were able to detect when and where those issues happened. We were able to provide useful information to the application team in real-time so they could find a solution quickly," says the cloud infrastructure architect.
Cutting costs with the cloud
Previously, multiple, siloed monitoring tools resulted in potential confusion and inaccuracies, especially when different teams were collaborating. Switching to Elastic enabled the company to build a centralized monitoring system, improving dashboard clarity and delivering significant cost savings. Troubleshooting time was reduced by 1/6 FTE, with further reductions expected.
A spokesperson from the company's partner digital consultancy firm, says, "The consolidation of log management and data indexing into a single platform has had a profound impact on reducing MTTR. The transformation not only boosted operational responsiveness but also accelerated the development of data-driven dashboards, empowering a broader set of business users to track key performance indicators that are directly aligned with strategic goals."
"By leveraging Elastic, we’ve helped Italy’s leading gas distribution company streamline its operations, enhancing efficiency across the board. The introduction of custom alerts and anomaly detection capabilities has further enabled proactive issue resolution."
Operational excellence and risk mitigation
By providing real-time visibility into system performance, the company can better monitor meter connections and address issues before they impact service.
Elastic also delivers significant benefits across the broader gas ecosystem. By providing centralized, real-time insights, it improves coordination, which means better visibility into infrastructure performance and quicker identification of issues, resulting in more reliable service. Customers also benefit, as Elastic's observability supports faster response times and more accurate troubleshooting through improved data tracking.
A fast track to AI advantage
The cloud infrastructure architect and his team are also inspired by the frequent release of new AI features in Elastic Observability, including machine learning algorithms for anomaly detection and an AI Assistant that provides contextual insights and generates actionable alerts.
"Elastic's commitment to continuously advancing its AI capabilities gives us confidence in its roadmap and aligns with our goal to stay at the forefront of technology," he says. "Because we need to ingest and parse a large number of logs in real-time, we are looking at automatic log parsing and pipeline creation via generative AI."
Since the initial deployment, the digital consultancy firm and Elastic have introduced a number of useful features, including adaptive baselines through ML Jobs, custom alerts, and improved log management. Additionally, the team at the Italian utility company has been trained in log browsing and error troubleshooting in Elastic.
