Case Study: Abnormal AI cuts observability costs and boosts platform reliability with Chronosphere

Abnormal Security Chooses Chronosphere To Cut Observability Costs, Boost Platform Reliability

Abnormal AI, an AI-driven email security company, faced rapid customer growth that overwhelmed its homegrown Prometheus + Grafana monitoring stack. With metrics rising from ~10–12M toward 50M, a single EC2-hosted Prometheus instance was costly, not highly available, slow to query, limited to two-day retention, and prone to crashes—threatening Abnormal AI’s reliability and its 99.9% SLA. To address this, Abnormal AI partnered with Chronosphere for a scalable observability solution.

Chronosphere delivered a Prometheus-compatible SaaS observability platform with a collector and control plane that enabled aggressive metric aggregation, flexible retention, and predictable scaling. Chronosphere helped Abnormal AI aggregate 98% of metrics (making observability ~10x more cost-effective), cut MTTD/MTTR by at least 80% (MTTD improved from >5 minutes to <1 minute), sped up dashboards 8–10x (including multi-month queries), and increased stability to >99.9% uptime—freeing engineers to focus on product work rather than monitoring.

Abnormal AI

Elder Yoshida

Software Engineering Tech Lead Manager