Smarter Log Management in Fintech

About This Company 

This company is one of Europe’s fastest-growing fintech platforms. They are revolutionizing the Buy Now, Pay Later credit card market, making it easier for people to shop online and helping retailers attract more customers and become more profitable as a result. The company’s operating income has surpassed $1B to process millions of transactions per day across hundreds of thousands of merchants. With headquarters and engineering leadership in Europe, this company’s technology reaches merchants and shoppers in Europe and North America. With leading investors and financial institutions backing this platform, the stakes for this company are high.

The Challenge

The log management approach that this company had in place, using Splunk — primarily a security application —  simply was too expensive to be effective.

The catalyst for this transition was COVID-19, which spurred on digital transformation across the globe.

Within this context, the retail industry was under pressure to keep up with the sudden and rapid digital commerce boom. As a result, the company was under pressure to provide the fintech infrastructure to support this unprecedented growth.

There were a few critical challenges that the company faced, which were becoming difficult to navigate using Splunk alone:

• Massive log volume growth was leading to performance issues at scale
• Real-time audit reporting requirements
• Data retention limitations, which prohibited year over year trend analysis
• Visibility loss around transactions taking place

The company needed a new log analytics infrastructure that could keep up with the practicalities of day-to-day activities given constraints around cost and data retention. 

Before using ChaosSearch, the company sent their cloud trails and load balancer logs directly to Splunk, which parsed and indexed this data. This process proved inadequate — both costly and inefficient. Also, there were gaps in visibility due to so much information sent through Splunk. 

ChaosSearch reduces complexities, helping the company gain more utility and efficiency from its enterprise app ecosystem — including Splunk.

The Solution

The company learned about ChaosSearch following a comprehensive search for potential solutions. The elegance of ChaosSearch’s simple approach won decision-makers over. They didn't know there was a platform that could index, search, and analyze all their data as-is — without transformation and without movement. 

Discussions around a potential collaboration took place, and after an extensive vetting process, the company was ready to get started. 

The most significant area of focus was transitioning the team to a new way of working. 

The company had limited room for a potential error. However, ChaosSearch’s simple interface, combined with the customer success team’s hands-on guidance, ensured the successful transition of the company’s business-critical log management operations. 

Now ChaosSearch manages the entire environment on behalf of the company, which reduces the number of nodes (and engineering resources) needed to keep its log management and Splunk infrastructure up and running.

Indexing the data in S3 with no data movement or ETL process enables a more agile, cost-effective, and adaptable environment overall.

The Results

The company is on pace to save 70% pairing ChaosSearch with Splunk.

Deploying ChaosSearch alongside Splunk, this new system extends the company’s data retention periods from weeks to years — enabling trend analyses over longer periods of time.

With this capability, the company can better adapt to rapidly shifting shopper behaviors, complex data privacy laws, and security requirements.

Ultimately, these shifts translate into better technical and people processes that ensure a high integrity product during a critical time, all while saving the company $3.5 million / year.