Multiple monitoring tools create visibility gaps
Visma e-conomic provides cloud-based accounting software that is primarily used by Danish companies to manage their financial operations, including bookkeeping, invoicing, expense tracking, and reporting. The platform offers features like automatic VAT reporting, real-time financial overviews, and integration with other business applications to automate tasks and boost efficiency. Today, more than 250,000 companies rely on the Visma e-conomic application for their financial operations.
Despite the fact that the company’s app is nearly 25 years old, Visma e-conomic maintains a fast development pace with about 40 deployments per day across almost 200 interconnected services. Their main database contains about 10 TB of data, and they operate 20 staging environments that are in constant use. The company has ambitious goals, including achieving 99.95% uptime annually. They also recently transitioned to microservices hosted on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) to improve their customer experience and software delivery metrics.
As Visma e-conomic scaled its operations, its engineering team recognized the need for better observability. The company was using multiple monitoring tools–one for logs and another one for traces/metrics, making it harder to correlate the data. Infrastructure monitoring was handled independently. While each tool served a purpose, linking data across them required significant manual effort. These tools also provided insufficient visibility into Visma’s Google Cloud environment.
The company wanted to evolve from reactive to proactive monitoring while consolidating their tools. Their growing microservices architecture needed comprehensive tracing capabilities to maintain visibility across service interactions. “Enhanced visibility boosts uptime and helps prevent customer frustration, especially if we also benefit from meaningful alerts making us proactive when issues appear,” says Claudiu Socaci, Lead Developer.
Visma e-conomic began searching for a unified observability solution that would help them achieve their uptime goals, reduce maintenance overhead, and provide a single pane of glass to monitor their complex, evolving architecture.
Unified visibility across backend, frontend, and infrastructure
Visma e-conomic quickly determined that building a custom monitoring solution wasn’t viable. “Developing our own solution would be a complex undertaking, and one of the main reasons we moved away from our previous setup was the heavy maintenance burden it required,” explains Socaci. “Building and maintaining our own tooling was a no-go from the beginning.”
After evaluating several observability platforms, Visma e-conomic narrowed their decision to two finalists. They then weighed costs versus capabilities, including features like publicly shareable dashboards and real user monitoring (RUM). Datadog emerged as their clear choice. “The other solutions were not as feature-rich and did not integrate metrics, logs, and traces as well as Datadog does,” says Socaci. “We loved the fact that the linking between logs, metrics, traces, and RUM was so seamless.”
“The other solutions were not as feature-rich and did not integrate metrics, logs, and traces as well as Datadog does.”
Onboarding was fast, according to Socaci. Initial setup took just a couple of days, followed by approximately two weeks to refine the configuration and fully onboard the application.
Today, Visma e-conomic uses Datadog across its Google Cloud environment. For backend observability, they use Log Management, Application Performance Monitoring (APM), and metrics. On the frontend, they use RUM for both web and mobile applications, Session Replay, and Synthetic Monitoring. The team has built over 1,000 monitors across APM, Log Management, and metrics, including approximately 100 monitors specifically for Service Level Objectives (SLOs). They also use CI Pipeline Visibility to monitor and improve the performance of their CI/CD pipelines and Watchdog for anomaly detection.
“The team also likes using Synthetic Monitoring to conduct overall health checks. They recently deprecated another service in favor of Datadog to perform those tasks. “Using Synthetics to conduct health checks gives us one more way to ensure everything is fine.”
Most recently, Visma e-conomic adopted Datadog On-Call, further consolidating their operations workflow within Datadog with unified monitoring, paging, and incident response.
Achieving 99.95% uptime and faster resolution
Visma e-conomic now has end-to-end observability in place and is actively monitoring nearly 200 services. This has accelerated troubleshooting and is helping the company achieve its 99.95% uptime SLA. “The alerts enable us to act fast, which means that customers are happier because it not only reduces the time to identify the issue but often allows us to be proactive and resolve it before it affects more customers,” explains Socaci. “That achievement can’t be realized using data alone.”
“The alerts enable us to act fast, which means that customers are happier because it not only reduces the time to identify the issue but often allows us to be proactive and resolve it before it affects more customers.”
Visma e-conomic has realized substantial operational efficiencies through tool consolidation and interconnected observability. Socaci estimates that they’ve saved approximately one full-time employee’s worth of work on maintenance and data correlation alone, which enabled them to reassign an employee to higher-value tasks.
Looking ahead, the company is exploring additional Datadog capabilities, including Cloud Cost Management, to further optimize their operations.
By eliminating the need to maintain multiple monitoring tools and manually correlate data across platforms, the Visma e-conomic engineering team can focus on building features that serve their 250,000+ customers. With unified observability in place, the company is better positioned to continue scaling its microservices architecture, maintain consistent uptime, and deliver reliable financial software to businesses across Denmark.
