From Zero Budget to Complete Observability with Grafana Cloud & OpenTelemetry | AXA Germany

Description

When a five-person team at AXA Germany set out to build a no-cost monitoring stack, they never expected it would evolve into full observability at scale. Product Owner, Sebastian Miottke, and Software Engineer, Julia Dutzmann share how automation, standardization, and OpenTelemetry helped them unify hundreds of applications and onboard 500 users with Grafana Cloud. Learn how their self-service approach, auto-labeling, and Prometheus Management Agent drove adoption—and how moving to Grafana Cloud unlocked enterprise features, reduced complexity, and accelerated their observability journey. Chapters: 00:00 – Introduction: A small team, big vision 01:00 – The challenge: No budget, no developer time 04:00 – Open source start: Prometheus + Grafana OSS 06:00 – Standardization & auto-labeling 09:00 – Self-service alerting and configuration automation 13:00 – Automating incident creation in ServiceNow 15:00 – Measuring success: Growth in targets and users 16:30 – From open source to Grafana Cloud 18:30 – Simplifying with Fleet Management and Managed Alerts 20:40 – Expanding tracing & OpenTelemetry adoption 21:45 – Continuous improvement and future goals Links/resources: Full recap of ObservabilityCON announcements: https://grafana.com/blog/2025/10/08/observabilitycon-2025-announcements/ Learn about the ServiceNow plugin: https://grafana.com/grafana/plugins/grafana-servicenow-datasource/ More about Fleet Management in Grafana Cloud: https://grafana.com/docs/grafana-cloud/send-data/fleet-management/ Get started with the Grafana Cloud forever-free tier: https://grafana.com/g/cloud Have a question? Ask Grot, your AI helper: https://grafana.com/grot/ Reach out in our community forums: https://gra.fan/communityyf --- Thanks for watching! 👍 Was this video helpful? Like and subscribe to our channel for more videos. Connect with Grafana Labs: X: (https://www.twitter.com/grafana) LinkedIn: (https://www.linkedin.com/company/grafana-labs/) Facebook: (https://www.facebook.com/grafana) Bluesky: (https://bsky.app/profile/grafana.bsky.social) Mastodon: (https://grafana.social/@grafana) #Grafana #Observability #GrafanaCloud #OpenTelemetry #AXA