Case Study: Starling Bank achieves full-stack visibility for faster issue prevention and remediation with IBM Instana Observability

Disruption-free banking. Achieved through full-stack visibility

Starling Bank, a fast-growing digital-first bank with four million customer accounts, needed a way to keep its always-on online banking services available and quickly trace issues across a complex, regulated IT environment. In 2018, it turned to IBM and IBM Instana Observability to trace requests end to end and identify problems fast when downtime or high error rates threatened customer service.

IBM implemented Instana Observability over a couple of months to provide automated full-stack visibility across Starling Bank’s multi-tenant environment, including 2,000 container pods, six Kubernetes clusters, and 800 services. The result was one-second data granularity, three-second error notifications, faster debugging, and better incident prevention, helping engineers pinpoint broken components more quickly and gain clearer insight into Kubernetes deployments.

Starling Bank

Chris Skaaning

Technical Lead