INNIO Slashes Observability Costs by 6x and Gains Instant Root Cause Detection with groundcover

About INNIO

INNIO Group is a global leader in sustainable energy solutions, enabling industries and communities to manage the transition to a net zero future. Through its Jenbacher and Waukesha product brands and the AI-powered myPlant digital platform, INNIO delivers innovative power generation and compression technologies with flexibility, scalability, and resilience. With operations in more than 80 countries and over 40,000 installed units, INNIO helps customers generate and manage energy reliably across the full value chain. The myPlant platform provides real-time visibility into energy assets, enabling performance monitoring, issue anticipation, and operational optimization.

Challenge / Problem

The digital team at INNIO is tasked with building and managing remote connectivity and monitoring solutions for critical infrastructure, where downtime is not an option. Their engines run 24/7 across the globe, powering communities that depend on uninterrupted energy. Before groundcover, INNIO relied on Zabbix and New Relic, but both fell short of their needs. 

New Relic in particular consumed one to two terabytes of data per day, driving costs to unsustainable levels. Developers were forced to contend with fragmented instrumentation that varied by programming language, and visibility into performance was inconsistent and incomplete. Root cause analysis often required complex SQL queries and manual investigation, consuming hours of valuable time. On top of that, sensitive observability data was stored externally, raising compliance and security concerns.

Why groundcover?

Groundcover gave INNIO the ability to consolidate logs, metrics, and traces into a single lightweight deployment, removing the burden of multiple agents and fragmented tools. Developers gained immediate visibility into service calls, latency, and bottlenecks without having to adjust their workflows. By hosting observability data in their own environment, INNIO cut costs by six times compared to New Relic, eliminating runaway ingestion bills and ensuring full control over sensitive data.

The experience of troubleshooting changed dramatically. With groundcover, Phardelain and his team can now identify the root cause of incidents in less than 10 seconds, compared to the hours required before. This speed and clarity has impressed not only developers but also leadership, who saw firsthand how quickly issues could be resolved. For the first time, developers felt empowered to understand how their code performed in production rather than working blind.

Impact / Results

The shift to groundcover reduced observability costs by a factor of six while simultaneously improving mean time to resolution. Incidents that once stretched across hours of manual investigation can now be identified and resolved in seconds. With unified coverage across logs, metrics, traces, and soon real user monitoring, INNIO’s engineers have a level of visibility they never had before. This new clarity has sparked a cultural shift, as developers and leadership alike engage with observability data as a natural part of their daily workflow. What was once a reactive and costly burden has become a driver of efficiency, empowerment, and resilience.

Future Outlook

INNIO is steadily expanding its use of groundcover. The team has already begun implementing real user monitoring and end-to-end tracing from the user interface through the backend and database. They plan to fully migrate away from New Relic by the end of the year, ensuring that all observability is consolidated under groundcover. Looking forward, the team is particularly interested in tighter integrations for ServiceNow and email escalation, as well as the addition of FinOps capabilities to provide deeper insights into cost allocation across teams and services.

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