Eeze: Powering Low-Latency Live Casino Gaming with Unified Observability

About Eeze

Eeze is a B2B live casino game provider. It develops and operates real-time, video-based casino games for online gaming operators worldwide. Operators integrate Eeze games through APIs and lobbies, often alongside other game providers. They maintain full ownership of their players.

Because casino game licensing is issued per geography, Eeze must maintain a local presence in many regions. This has created a highly distributed infrastructure across on-premises environments and cloud deployments. In this world, latency is mission-critical. Even small delays can break immersion, degrade gameplay, and directly impact revenue.

The Challenge: Fragmented Observability in a Hybrid, Multi-Region Environment

Eeze operates multiple on-prem clusters and standalone servers across geographies. This is to meet licensing and data-residency requirements. At the same time, the company is transitioning to a hybrid model using AWS and Amazon EKS. This includes hybrid nodes that connect local machines in data centers to remote EKS clusters.

To support this environment, Eeze relied on a broad open-source observability stack. This includes ELK / OpenSearch, Prometheus, Grafana, and Jaeger. Over time, this approach became harder to operate and scale.

Observability tools lacked a clear owner and had unreliable uptime. Each data center ran its own isolated stack. Accessing the right logs or traces meant logging into the correct system for the correct environment. This was often done under pressure during an incident.

One customer incident made the risk painfully clear: while troubleshooting a production issue, the team discovered that their ELK instance had been down without anyone noticing.

“I found out the hard way while troubleshooting a customer issue. We went to the ELK instance, only to discover it had been down for five days. That’s where the trail ended.”

Danny Froberg, Manager of Site Reliability Engineering, Eeze

With five data centers and multiple environments per region, observability fragmentation became the biggest blocker to fast troubleshooting, automation, and confidence in production.

Why groundcover

Danny was already familiar with groundcover from a previous role, but several factors made it the right fit for Eeze’s unique constraints.‍

A Single Pane of Glass for the Entire Company

The primary goal was to eliminate fragmentation and make observability accessible to everyone—not just DevOps or backend engineers.

With groundcover, EEZE finally achieved a true single-pane-of-glass experience, where metrics, logs, and traces live in one place and are instantly accessible across teams.

“What I wanted was a single pane of glass - for absolutely everybody in the company.”

Danny Froberg, Manager of Site Reliability Engineering, Eeze

Now, teams can share links directly in Slack. Post-incident reviews remain actionable weeks later, and no time is lost searching for the right system or dashboard.

 Operational Simplicity and Predictable Costs

After years spent removing Datadog due to cost overruns, pricing transparency became essential. groundcover’s simple per-node pricing model enabled wide adoption without concerns about surprise bills.

“Datadog is excellent - until you start using it and get the bill.”

Danny Froberg, Manager of Site Reliability Engineering, Eeze

Easy installation and a fully managed experience set groundcover apart. The solution removed both the operational and financial friction that had plagued EEZE’s previous setup.

BYOC for Regulatory and Data Residency Requirement

EEZE operates under strict regulatory constraints that require data to remain within specific jurisdictions. groundcover’s Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC) architecture allowed EEZE to meet these requirements while still benefiting from a managed, SaaS-like observability experience.

The Impact: Ownership, Visibility, and Faster Resolution

Observability with a Clear Owner

With groundcover, observability is no longer an afterthought. The platform is fully managed, reliable, and covered by an SLA—removing the burden of operating monitoring infrastructure from Eeze’s teams.

One Configuration Across All Environments

Eeze standardized observability across on-prem and cloud environments:

• A single, predictable configuration for all clusters
• Ongoing migration from Prometheus, ELK, and Jaeger into groundcover
• Gradual decommissioning of resource-heavy monitoring stacks from data centers
  

This freed on-prem resources to focus on what matters most: running live casino games, not supporting observability infrastructure.

Faster Investigations and Deeper Insights

By aggregating all telemetry into one platform, Eeze significantly reduced investigation time. Teams can now correlate logs, metrics, and traces instantly and build dashboards that reflect the full behavior of their services.

As adoption grew, teams began uncovering errors and edge cases that had gone unnoticed before. Observability now extends beyond Kubernetes as well - standalone EC2 instances and on-prem hosts also send data into groundcover, eliminating blind spots.

Solving Latency Across Regions

One of the biggest wins has been visibility into cross-region latency. With distributed tracing, Eeze can now follow requests end-to-end, even when users and backend services are located in different parts of the world.

This allows teams to understand how geography affects performance, validate architectural decisions, and proactively improve the player experience.

“We get a lot more visibility into basically every piece of step. Especially when they are hunting latency issues… in every component that’s distributed across regions.”

Danny Froberg, Manager of Site Reliability Engineering, Eeze

In a latency-sensitive, video-driven product, this visibility directly translates into smoother gameplay and better user experience.

The result

By replacing a fragile, fragmented observability stack with groundcover, Eeze achieved:

• Unified observability across hybrid and on-prem environments
• Faster incident response and clearer root-cause analysis
• Deep visibility into latency and cross-region performance
• Reduced operational overhead and predictable costs

Most importantly, Eeze can now focus on delivering smooth, low-latency live casino gaming - confident that observability is no longer a bottleneck, but a competitive advantage.