Case Study: Volkswagen achieves centralized, scalable distributed logging and monitoring with Elastic

Distributed Logging and Monitoring at Volkswagen using the Elastic Stack

Volkswagen Group IT faced a rapid digitalization challenge: dozens of independent brands and hundreds of services generating massive amounts of logs and metrics across hybrid cloud environments, with strict security, data‑protection and scalability requirements. Off‑the‑shelf tools did not meet the need for a uniform, cloud‑agnostic monitoring and logging platform.

Volkswagen built a central Monitoring & Logging as a Service based on an Elastic Stack architecture with a messaging pipeline (HTTPS/Kafka), authentication and enrichment, Elasticsearch/Kibana (with X‑Pack), and a self‑service API and UI to support OpenStack/AWS/Azure and horizontal scaling. Deployed in July 2016, it serves 40 projects across 150+ tenants, handles ~70,000 entries / 100 MB per minute on average (peak ~250,000/min), and produced lessons on automation, observability and component lifecycle management.

Volkswagen

Till Gloger

Project Lead Systems Management