Case Study: Akka achieves reliable, scalable observability with Grafana Cloud

How Lightbend, the Company Behind the Stateful Serverless Platform-as-a-service Akka Serverless, Uses Grafana Cloud to Monitor Its Infrastructure

Lightbend, the company behind Akka Serverless, needed a centralized way to monitor its rapidly growing Kubernetes-based, cloud native platform and keep visibility into thousands of functions, clusters, and customer deployments. As traffic and infrastructure complexity increased, the team needed better observability to detect issues early, meet SLAs/SLOs, and avoid downtime without spending time managing a self-hosted monitoring stack.

Lightbend implemented Grafana Cloud, using Grafana with Prometheus, Cortex, Graphite, and synthetic monitoring to collect metrics, build dashboards, and alert on anomalies across its environment. With Grafana, the team monitors more than 420,000 active series, saves an estimated 20–30 minutes per incident, and has avoided downtime so far for Akka Serverless. Grafana also helped Lightbend catch a major Google outage before customers were affected, enabling the team to add capacity and ride out the incident successfully.

Akka

Fernando Costa

Lead Site Reliability Engineer