Scaling financial services through 10x growth

Bullla is working to make credit more accessible to underserved consumers across Brazil. Its flagship product, the Bullla Card, gives companies a digital solution for managing salary advances, credit, benefits, and compensation through a single card and partner. For employees, it provides greater flexibility and fewer barriers when accessing and using their funds.

Bullla has granted more than BRL 7.3 billion in microcredit, issued over 3.6 million cards, and now serves more than 600,000 customers. Its platform supports more than 3.2 million transactions annually and has processed over 287 million financial operations.

Behind that scale is Bullla’s SRE, Observability, and 24/7 IT Operations organization. The team treats technology as a business enabler responsible for protecting revenue, preserving customer satisfaction, and ensuring every interaction remains reliable. “Our customers often rely on Bullla when they need fast, predictable access to funds,” says Rodrigo Andriolo, Executive IT Manager at Bullla. “If the application is unstable at that moment, it creates real friction in their lives. Our responsibility is to make the technology dependable when it matters most.”

That responsibility grew as Bullla expanded more than 10x in three years. Its team needed to support rapidly increasing transaction volumes without proportionally increasing technical complexity or headcount. Fragmented visibility made incidents slower to diagnose and limited the predictability required to scale efficiently.

Improving predictability as transaction volume grows

Bullla evaluated observability platforms based on ease of integration, support for legacy and modern environments, intelligent data correlation, and the ability to provide immediate value to both technology and business teams. It selected Datadog to bring metrics, traces, logs, and source code together within a single platform. “We were not looking for another isolated monitoring tool,” says Andriolo. “We needed end-to-end visibility that could connect what was happening inside our systems with the impact on customers and the business.”

Bullla now uses Datadog across Engineering, SRE, 24/7 Operations, and Backoffice teams. Application Performance Monitoring, Log Management, Synthetic Monitoring, Real User Monitoring (RUM), and business KPI dashboards provide a shared view across its cloud environment and critical, high-volume applications.

“We were not looking for another isolated monitoring tool. We needed end-to-end visibility that could connect what was happening inside our systems with the impact on customers and the business.”

This visibility extends beyond technical teams. Directors and vice presidents monitor business KPIs through mobile widgets, giving leadership a real-time view of system performance and business activity. Observability has become an input for strategic and commercial decisions, particularly as Bullla introduces its services to new corporate partners.

This is especially important within Bullla’s B2B2C model. An employee’s experience with the Bullla application also reflects on the employer offering the service. Maintaining a reliable onboarding and card experience protects both Bullla’s brand and its corporate partners’ relationships with their employees.

Accelerating resolution with AI and automation

Bullla has embedded Bits AI into its engineering workflows to correlate metrics, traces, logs, and source code. Instead of manually searching across disconnected signals, teams can use AI-generated root cause analysis, postmortems, and remediation recommendations to investigate incidents more efficiently. “Bits AI gives us business and technical visibility at a much higher level and in dramatically less time,” says Andriolo. “It helps us connect the data, identify root causes, and give our engineers accurate direction within minutes.”

These capabilities helped Bullla reduce global mean time to resolution (MTTR) from 11 hours to less than one hour, an improvement of approximately 90%. For critical incidents, the team has shortened troubleshooting time by up to 80%, reducing the risk of lost credit originations and preventing prolonged friction for customers attempting to use their cards. With Bits Chat, Bullla has also reduced the time required to produce security incident reports by approximately 96%, enabling faster documentation, response, and follow-up.

“Bits AI gives us business and technical visibility at a much higher level and in dramatically less time. It helps us connect the data, identify root causes, and give our engineers accurate direction within minutes.”

Bullla has also introduced self-healing capabilities across modern and legacy systems. Known failures can be mitigated automatically without waiting for human intervention. Together with automated postmortems and root cause analysis notebooks, these workflows save hundreds of engineering hours annually and allow teams to focus on innovation instead of repetitive investigation.

Because these AI capabilities are native to Datadog, Bullla can benefit from intelligent agents without building and maintaining separate MCP or RAG architectures. According to Bullla, this approach reduces the additional cost, staffing, and technical complexity associated with maintaining separate AI infrastructure. “We have moved away from constant firefighting,” says Andriolo. “Our teams have greater predictability, known issues can resolve themselves, and engineers can focus their time on improving the product and customer experience.”

Turning observability into customer value

Bullla prioritizes a smooth experience from the moment employees begin using its services. During in-person deployments at partner companies, its operations team uses RUM to follow the end-user journey remotely and support implementation teams working on site.

If users encounter registration questions or usability friction, Bullla can see what is happening within the application and provide immediate guidance to the field team. This real-time support improves registration conversion, creates a smoother onboarding experience, and helps the product team identify opportunities to make the application easier to use.

“We have moved away from constant firefighting. Our teams have greater predictability, known issues can resolve themselves, and engineers can focus their time on improving the product and customer experience.”

The broader impact is reflected in Bullla’s availability, which increased from a historical level of 97% to 99.99%. That increased availability helps Bullla reduce the revenue risk associated with unavailable credit and card services while strengthening customer and corporate partner confidence in the platform. “Observability is no longer limited to understanding whether our systems are healthy,” says Andriolo. “It helps us understand the customer experience, protect revenue, support commercial decisions, and identify where we can deliver more value.”

Looking ahead, Bullla plans to expand AIOps and Bits AI across more strategic areas of the company. The team wants to use predictive analysis to anticipate systemic anomalies, uncover business opportunities, guide technology improvements, and continually reduce operational costs. “Building our SRE and Observability organization has shown us that technology is one of the strongest drivers of growth, stability, and customer satisfaction,” says Andriolo. “With Datadog, we can keep expanding access to financial services while delivering the reliability and simplicity our customers deserve.”

“Building our SRE and Observability organization has shown us that technology is one of the strongest drivers of growth, stability, and customer satisfaction. With Datadog, we can keep expanding access to financial services while delivering the reliability and simplicity our customers deserve.”