Case Study: a leading financial services company achieves 4x faster queries and 50% lower storage costs with StarTree Cloud

Real-Time Observability of Financial Transactions Using StarTree Cloud

A leading financial services company needed a distributed tracing and observability architecture that could scale with high transaction volumes across many payment methods and answer high-cardinality questions in real time. It chose StarTree Cloud, powered by Apache Pinot, to support its observability stack alongside OpenTelemetry, Jaeger, Hypertrace, Kafka, and Kubernetes.

StarTree implemented real-time analytics on fresh trace data streamed from Kafka, using Apache Pinot’s star-tree index and tiered storage to improve performance and reduce infrastructure costs. The result was 4x faster queries, support for up to 100,000 spans in a single request, and a 50% reduction in storage costs, while also enabling longer data retention.