PepsiCo products are enjoyed by consumers around the world more than one billion times a day. A company of this size and scale needs to ensure the optimal performance and availability of its critical infrastructure. That’s why, throughout its 130-year history, PepsiCo has made IT and digital innovation key pillars of its operations and growth strategy.
Vinod Chilakalapudi, director of observability at One PepsiCo Operations Center, was seeking to reduce IT costs, improve IT analysts’ efficiency, and recoup revenue. So, he turned to the Elasticsearch Platform for a single, unified solution for observability that delivers fast, scalable, and relevant insights to reduce the number of outages and breaches. Chilakalapudi made Elastic the backbone of PepsiCo’s AI strategy to integrate machine learning and generative AI into end-to-end observability and real-time monitoring.
99.9% uptime
50% reduction in data storage costs
33% reduction in MTTR
The challenge
Fragmented tools were inefficient and costly
PepsiCo’s legacy observability tools were fragmented and siloed. Inefficient anomaly detection, slow root cause analysis, and reactive incident management led to higher mean time to resolution (MTTR), operational inefficiencies, and service disruptions.
PepsiCo ingests more than 13.7 terabytes of data every month. The team needed a more cost-efficient way to store data and operate hardware. The goal was to ensure the optimal performance, reliability, and security of its critical infrastructure and applications. And for a global fast-moving consumer good (FMCG) leader like PepsiCo, maintaining supply chain visibility and operational agility is crucial.
The transformation and results
Creating greater efficiencies with a unified platform
Understanding the importance of a unified platform, Chilakalapudi chose Elasticsearch Platform, with its out-of-the-box, Elastic Observability, to deploy across 38+ critical applications and gain a comprehensive 360-degree view. Elastic’s unified platform strengthened PepsiCo’s enterprise resilience and supported its ongoing IT modernization and cloud transformation journey.
Since implementing the Elasticsearch Platform with Elastic Observability, PepsiCo has:
- Achieved 99.9% application uptime
- Consolidated monitoring tools from 55 to fewer than 20
- Seen a 30% reduction in MTTR, or 4.8 hours in critical applications, after real-time analysis of performance metrics, tracing requests, and identifying performance bottlenecks
- Earned a customer satisfaction score of over 99%
- Reached a 23% automation rate in incident management and a 30% increase in preventive actions, leading to a significant drop in reactive incident response
- Reduced data storage costs by 50% with data tiering and cut hardware costs by $600,000 by moving to Elastic Cloud
"We've standardized Elastic as the core engine for ingesting and analyzing MELT data across PepsiCo, with a roadmap to 99% coverage. This foundation is accelerating telemetry-driven automation, enabling contextual insights, and powering intelligent operations at enterprise scale.”
— Vinod Chilakalapudi, Director, Observability at One PepsiCo Operations Center
Elasticsearch Platform
Discover the platform that helps PepsiCo boost efficiency and lower costs
The solution
Enhancing operational resilience and issue resolution
The Elasticsearch Platform provided PepsiCo with low-cost, scalable data storage with a searchable archive through Elastic data tiering. This foundation is the backbone of PepsiCo’s operational efficiency. On the Elasticsearch Platform are two out-of-the-box solutions: Elastic Security and Elastic Observability.
With Elastic Observability, PepsiCo enables early anomaly detection, rapid root-cause analysis, and proactive issue resolution across its digital ecosystem. It forged a more agile, resilient, and data-driven technology foundation, ultimately reducing operational costs and driving greater efficiency. The solution enabled real-time analysis of performance metrics, tracing requests, and identifying performance bottlenecks, significantly enhancing operational efficiency.
"Elastic is the backbone of PepsiCo's operational intelligence, powering proactive anomaly detection, rapid root cause isolation, and near-continuous uptime. This has translated into measurable reductions in downtime and elevated service reliability across our digital operations."
— Vinod Chilakalapudi, Director, Observability at One PepsiCo Operations Center
Why Elastic
Elastic was the obvious choice for PepsiCo, which previously worked with Splunk. Since switching to Elastic, PepsiCo can now:
- Optimize its costs via a modernized architecture and a flexible pricing model. Not only is Elastic’s pricing lower on a cost-per-node or per-license model, but users can quickly search productive nodes at scale, reducing hardware utilization and cloud spend. The platform enables PepsiCo to store data in lower-cost tiers while still maintaining full search functionality. There’s no need for cumbersome or costly data rehydrate jobs.
- Ensure technical and business operators achieve shared awareness and faster insights. Because Elastic is a single solution, rather than an amalgamation of fragmented solutions, users see a single pane of glass that enables teams to work from the same operating picture to resolve production issues and threats collaboratively.
- Empower IT teams to focus on strategic initiatives rather than reactive troubleshooting. By standardizing Elastic as the core engine for ingesting and analyzing metrics, events, logs, and traces (MELT) data across PepsiCo, Chilakalapudi and his team have accelerated incident response automation and get valuable time back to focus on strategic initiatives.
What's next
On the horizon for PepsiCo, Chilakalapudi says that the team aims to create a next-gen observability ecosystem powered by agentic AI and LLM-integrated telemetry. He believes that Elastic’s advancements in vector search and retrieval augmented generation (RAG) strongly align with their roadmap for autonomous, insight-driven operations.
