Scaling observability at AXA Germany with Grafana Cloud and OpenTelemetry: How standardization and automation drove adoption

Company: AXA Germany

Industry: Financial Services (Insurance)

As one of Germany’s leading insurance providers, AXA Germany delivers a broad range of products spanning property, life, health, and asset management. With over 400 developers supporting its digital platforms and customer-facing services, the company is acutely focused on reliability, transparency, and trust at every touchpoint. 

Challenge

Operating with limited budget and bandwidth, AXA Germany’s 5 member observability team faced a familiar challenge: fragmented legacy tools, siloed data, and no capacity to ask developers to instrument every application.

Solution

The team started with a lightweight, open source observability stack and evolved to Grafana Cloud as adoption and scale grew.

Key aspects of the solution:

• Open source foundation: Built initial observability on Prometheus and Grafana OSS, focusing on visibility without code changes.
• Smart instrumentation: Developed custom middleware exporters on proxies and gateways to surface shared metrics across services, all with no developer intervention required.
• Automation everywhere: Added a Prometheus Management Agent for automatic configuration, plus auto-labeling and metadata enrichment to ensure consistency.
• Self-service alerting: Built a simple UI that lets developers configure alerts with a single click—no YAML or Prometheus expertise needed.
• Migration to Grafana Cloud: After proving value, the team moved to Grafana Cloud to unlock Incident Response Management (IRM), Fleet Management, and Managed Alerts, while offloading infrastructure management.

Impact

This lightweight, open approach quickly proved its value, developers adopted dashboards organically, and leadership saw measurable impact with almost no manual effort.

That success unlocked new investment. AXA Germany migrated from Grafana OSS to Grafana Cloud, gaining built-in Incident Response Management (IRM), Fleet Management, and Managed Alerts, while offloading infrastructure operations entirely. 

• 500+ Grafana users across AXA Germany
• 5.5 million time series monitored
• ~1.8 new monitored targets added daily
• Observability evolved from a “nice to have” to a standard development expectation
• A five-person team delivered enterprise-scale impact through automation, not headcount

“Moving to Grafana Cloud reduced our complexity…Nobody wants to maintain a huge amount of infrastructure. Everybody wants to do the new cool stuff.”

— Julia Dutzmann, Software Engineer