Case Study: Thrivent reduces costs and cuts MTTR to improve customer experience with Datadog

How Thrivent Reduced Costs and Improved the Customer Experience

Thrivent, a member-owned financial services company serving over 2 million clients and managing more than $200 billion in assets, needed to modernize its digital infrastructure to deliver seamless, client-centric experiences. The organization was held back by legacy mainframes and 70-year-old policy systems alongside cloud-native apps, thousands of VMs, on‑prem Kubernetes, siloed teams, inconsistent observability, and a reactive process that often relied on help‑desk calls as the first signal of failure.

Thrivent deployed Datadog (Flex Logs, APM, RUM, Session Replay, Product Analytics, Service Catalog) to unify observability and drive a cultural shift toward shared ownership and faster decision‑making. Flex Logs cut logging costs by ~50% and made enterprise logging scalable, while APM and RUM delivered end‑to‑end visibility and faster triage. Outcomes included MTTR improving from about 10 hours to 3 hours (66% better), SLOs rising from 0 to 82, reduced support burden through platform consolidation, and measurably better collaboration and customer experience.

Thrivent

Jordan Winters

Engineering Manager