Case Study: OVO Energy achieves scalable, fault-tolerant processing for 1M+ smart meters with Aiven

Aiven platform underlies over 1 million OVO smart meters

OVO Energy, the UK’s leading independent energy company with over 1 million smart meters installed, needed a fault-tolerant, high-performing messaging backbone to power analytics and appliance disaggregation. Kafka was the clear choice but is hard to manage at scale, so OVO Energy selected Aiven — notably Aiven for Kafka — to provide a managed, extensible platform they could deploy in the cloud and region of their choice.

Aiven deployed managed Kafka clusters and packaged integrations (Aiven InfluxDB → Aiven Grafana for telemetry and Aiven Elasticsearch for logs), giving OVO Energy out‑of‑the‑box metrics, dashboards and log retention. The Aiven platform now underlies more than 1 million smart meters, enables rapid upscaling and experimentation (for example with message retention), and frees OVO Energy’s developers to focus on applications and customer experience rather than infrastructure.

OVO Energy

Jon Dodkins

Head of Group Tech Operations