Maintaining performance across millions of daily retail transactions

Supporting critical retail operations on a national scale, Coop Norge plays a central role in everyday life across Norway, ensuring that millions of customers have reliable access to food, building materials, and essential goods. With more than 1,250 physical stores, 57 digital stores, 16 industrial locations and 5 warehouses, among them CLOG, one of Norway’s largest and most automated logistics centers, and among the most modern in Europe within grocery logistics. In addition to this, Svalbardbutikken, the northernmost store in the world! With operations that span the entire country, its systems must perform consistently across both physical and digital retail experiences.

Every transaction, from scanning items at checkout to completing a mobile payment, depends on technology working in real time. Even small delays can have immediate consequences for customers. As Paul Noer-Rønning explains, “In retail, milliseconds matter. If a payment slows down or fails, customers notice immediately, and that directly impacts their experience and our business.”

Ensuring that these services remain fast and reliable is critical to maintaining trust across Coop’s 2.5 million members.

As Coop Norge has continued to modernize its platforms and expand across hybrid and cloud environments, maintaining this level of performance required a more unified and scalable approach to visibility. The team needed deeper insight across infrastructure, applications, and customer journeys, especially during peak retail moments.

“In retail, milliseconds matter. If a payment slows down or fails, customers notice immediately, and that directly impacts their experience and our business.”

Unifying visibility across a complex retail ecosystem

Coop Norge operates across a highly distributed environment that combines on-premises systems with modern cloud platforms, including Azure. These systems support everything from logistics and inventory to in-store operations and digital services.

As this environment grew, so did the volume of operational data and the need to connect signals across systems. The team recognized an opportunity to bring visibility together and operate more efficiently. “We had visibility, but it was spread across multiple systems,” says Noer-Rønning. “An event might give us one line of information, and the rest had to be collected from other tools, which took valuable time during incidents.”

To address this, Coop Norge brought together Datadog Infrastructure Monitoring, Application Performance Monitoring, and Log Management to create a unified view across its entire stack. This allowed teams to correlate infrastructure health, application performance, and logs in real time, significantly improving how they detect and understand issues.

At the same time, Coop Norge wanted to simplify its tooling landscape and improve how it manages cloud usage. With Datadog Cloud Cost Management, the FinOps team gained clear visibility into cloud costs, as well as GitHub and Datadog spend, all attributed to cost centers and projects in a single, unified view. This makes it easier to track usage, identify inefficiencies, and optimize spend as digital services continue to scale.

Creating a unified foundation for insight, automation, and control

With observability unified across systems, Coop Norge transformed how it monitors performance and responds to issues. Engineers can now move seamlessly from high level alerts to detailed diagnostics, using correlated data across infrastructure, applications, and logs to understand root causes quickly.

This visibility is especially critical for key customer journeys such as payments. Using Synthetic Monitoring, Coop Norge can map the full payment flow and continuously test critical paths, receiving alerts the moment performance begins to degrade. As Noer-Rønning explains, this allows the team to detect issues early and even identify problems with external providers before they affect stores or customers.

“Shared dashboards create shared goals. When everyone sees the same data, it reduces misunderstandings and helps us move much faster.”

When incidents occur, teams rely on Incident Response workflows to quickly coordinate across teams, using shared dashboards and real-time context to align on the issue and take action. “Having a shared view changes how we work during incidents,” says Noer-Rønning. “We can immediately understand what is happening and respond as one team.”

Automation has further strengthened this approach. Through Workflow Automation, Coop Norge has reduced the need for manual investigation by streamlining repetitive analysis and response tasks. Instead of switching between tools and manually correlating data, teams can act faster with the right context already in place. “Shared dashboards create shared goals,” adds Noer-Rønning. “When everyone sees the same data, it reduces misunderstandings and helps us move much faster.”

Driving faster operations, lower costs, and stronger collaboration

With a unified and proactive approach in place, Coop Norge has significantly improved operational performance and efficiency. Teams can now detect issues earlier, understand them faster, and resolve them before they impact stores or customers.

Incident resolution time has been reduced by approximately 50%, enabling faster recovery and more consistent service availability across the organization. At the same time, automation and improved workflows have freed up around 4,000 hours of work annually, allowing teams to focus on improving systems rather than reacting to issues.

Consolidating multiple monitoring tools into a single platform has also simplified operations and reduced overhead, making it easier to scale as demand grows. Improved visibility into cloud usage has strengthened cost control, enabling Coop Norge to optimize resources and reduce unnecessary spend. These efficiencies have contributed to a roughly 50% reduction in monitoring costs while increasing overall capability.

“Reliable systems are essential to maintaining trust with our members, and with the visibility and control we have today, we can stay ahead of issues and keep our operations running smoothly as we grow.”

Just as importantly, this transformation has improved how teams work together. With a shared source of truth across infrastructure, applications, and business services, teams across operations, development, and leadership can collaborate more effectively. “Datadog has become a common language for us,” says Noer-Rønning. “It brings everyone together around the same data so we can move faster and make better decisions.”

With this foundation in place, Coop Norge is well positioned to continue modernizing its technology while maintaining the reliability its customers expect. As Noer-Rønning puts it, “Reliable systems are essential to maintaining trust with our members, and with the visibility and control we have today, we can stay ahead of issues and keep our operations running smoothly as we grow.”