Afida consolidates observability for regulated insurance workloads with groundcover

About Afida

Afida, a subsidiary of adesso, operates a specialized SaaS platform for the insurance industry, focused on managing and migrating run-off portfolios, primarily in life insurance, and increasingly in other domains such as car insurance. The platform is used by insurance providers operating under strict regulatory requirements in the German financial sector.

Afida runs its SaaS solution on AWS and Kubernetes, operating Java-based applications that were originally designed for on-prem environments. These applications are developed by another adesso subsidiary and adapted for the cloud by Afida, which means the team cannot modify application code directly. As a result, Afida must treat its applications as a black box, while still maintaining deep operational visibility, performance guarantees, and compliance with EU data residency regulations.

The challenge: fragmented tooling, limited access, and rising performance demands

Historically, Afida’s workloads were dominated by life insurance systems, where traffic volumes were low and availability was the primary concern. As the company expanded into new insurance domains such as car insurance, where customers expect real-time quotes and near-instant responses, performance and error visibility became increasingly critical.

At the same time, Afida’s observability stack had become complex, fragmented, and expensive. New Relic was initially used as an all-in-one monitoring solution, but over time it became harder to justify both financially and operationally.

“Basically we were using New Relic for everything and then we got to a point where it just got too expensive and also some functionality was just broken.”‍

Andreas Kappler, Senior Cloud Engineer, Afida

Per-user licensing restricted access across teams, and developers struggled to work across siloed tools for logs, infrastructure metrics, and monitoring.

Key workflows—such as log exploration—were no longer usable for developers, forcing Afida to move logs to a self-hosted Grafana Loki setup and infrastructure monitoring to AWS CloudWatch. This resulted in data silos that made troubleshooting slower and more error-prone.

In addition, New Relic’s per-user licensing model significantly limited adoption across teams.

“Previously with New Relic you had to acquire a license per-user which was pretty expensive and we did not ingest all the data.”

Andreas Kappler, Senior Cloud Engineer, Afida‍

Tracing capabilities were effectively unavailable, despite running Java agents in production. With limited support and no clear path to resolution, tracing was ultimately abandoned.

Why groundcover: full visibility without code changes

Afida chose groundcover to regain unified observability across Kubernetes, logs, and traces without requiring code changes, SDKs, or invasive instrumentation. This was especially important given the black-box nature of their applications.

Using groundcover’s eBPF-based tracing alongside OpenTelemetry traces sent directly to the platform, Afida gained deep visibility into request execution paths, database interactions, and internal function calls—capabilities they never had before.

“You can actually see what’s happening inside a request on a very detailed level… all the database calls and function calls.”

Andreas Kappler, Senior Cloud Engineer, Afida

groundcover also removed internal friction around access and collaboration. Instead of restricting observability to a small group of licensed users, Afida was able to make operational data broadly available across development and operations teams.

Today, traces are actively used across roles, from developers to operations engineers, and are a core part of Afida’s troubleshooting workflow.

“Before we had, I don’t know, 10 licenses for New Relic and now we have… maybe 100 users in groundcover.”‍

‍Andreas Kappler, Senior Cloud Engineer, Afida

The impact: faster root cause analysis and daily operational confidence

groundcover is now used continuously across test and production environments and has become a daily tool for diagnosing and resolving performance issues. By correlating traces, logs, and metrics in a single platform, teams can move from symptoms to root cause much faster than before.

“Without the data we see in groundcover, it would be almost impossible to find the root cause”

Andreas Kappler, Senior Cloud Engineer, Afida

While Afida believes similar insights might have been achievable with New Relic, doing so would have required significantly more effort, cost, and ongoing friction.

Beyond product capabilities, Afida also highlighted the responsiveness and quality of groundcover’s support as a meaningful part of their experience.

“We would probably have been able to get the same insights in New Relic, but at a much higher cost and with probably also more effort.”

Andreas Kappler, Senior Cloud Engineer, Afida

Try it yourself for free

Want to see how teams like b.well achieve full observability without unpredictable costs? Try groundcover for free today.