Case Study: Workiva reduces response times with OpenTracing from Cloud Native Computing Foundation

Workiva Using OpenTracing to help pinpoint the bottlenecks

Workiva, a company offering a cloud-based platform for managing business data, faced significant challenges in identifying performance bottlenecks as it shifted from a monolith to a distributed, microservice-based architecture. With their backend running across Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services, they needed a platform-agnostic tracing solution. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation's OpenTracing provided the necessary framework to pinpoint these issues across different teams and services.

By implementing the Cloud Native Computing Foundation's OpenTracing, Workiva gained immediate, actionable insight into their service performance. This allowed teams to identify and optimize inefficient calls, which resulted in a massive 95 percent reduction in average response time—from 600ms to 30ms—in a single fix and drastically improved their debugging and optimization processes.

Workiva

Michael Davis

Software Engineer