Case Study: Cisco Webex achieves real-time observability and lower latency with StarTree Apache Pinot

Cisco Webex Real-Time Observability Using Apache Pinot and Grafana

Cisco Webex needed a real-time observability solution that could keep up with more than 100 TB of telemetry data per day, peak loads above 300k messages per second, and the need to analyze billion-scale event streams without relying on pre-aggregations. Using StarTree’s Apache Pinot-based approach, Webex aimed to support real-time analytics and visualizations in Grafana and Kibana while preserving rich dimensional data for runtime queries.

StarTree helped Cisco Webex implement Apache Pinot as a faster, more efficient replacement for Elasticsearch, along with Grafana and Kibana integrations for dashboards and alerting. The result was p99 query latencies that were 5x to 150x lower, with most queries running in subsecond time and Elasticsearch timing out in 67% of benchmark cases. Cisco Webex also reduced its cluster footprint by more than 500 nodes and cut total data under management from 800 TB to 121 TB, improving both performance and infrastructure efficiency.

Cisco Webex