Solidus Labs Unifies Observability & Cut Costs with groundcover

About Solidus Labs

Solidus Labs, founded in 2018 by former Goldman Sachs engineers and cybersecurity professionals, is a leading provider of multidimensional market integrity solutions. Its mission is to enable safer trading across centralized and decentralized markets - spanning trade surveillance, transaction monitoring, and broader market integrity workflows. Supporting live trading environments globally, Solidus Labs operates on a cloud-native infrastructure designed for maximal reliability and availability. Its flagship platform, HALO, handles both batch and real-time governance at significant scale, operating under strict, non-negotiable high-availability requirements.

The Challenge: Maintaining Proactive Resilience in High-Stakes Environments

Solidus Labs' cloud-native stack gives them flexibility and a streamlined approach to continuous delivery, but it also inherently introduces complex interdependencies across infrastructure and application layers.

In a sector where platform downtime directly impacts customer compliance posture and carries significant regulatory implications, real-time visibility is business-critical. To maintain an elite standard of operational excellence, the engineering team requires a highly proactive alerting framework - one that identifies subtle system anomalies and optimizes performance before they can ever ripple into the user experience.

Solidus Labs' previous observability setup created several challenges that limited their ability to scale and respond with maximum speed:

• Infrastructure visibility was technically complex, limiting who on the team could meaningfully participate in monitoring and investigation.
• Distributed tracing, critical for monitoring throughput, latencies, and error rates, did not scale reliably and required ongoing maintenance effort from both developers and the DevOps team.
• There was no single place to correlate logs, metrics, traces, and infrastructure events, making root cause analysis slower and more cumbersome than it needed to be.
  

"One of the complexities of a microservices architecture is the ability to efficiently isolate the root cause of systemic issues. Before adopting groundcover, correlating infrastructure-level anomalies with application-level performance was a challenge.”

- Noam Shoeg, Director of R&D, Solidus Labs

Why groundcover?

• Consolidated, Kubernetes-native observability: The ability to gain deep insight into K8s infrastructure, together with all of our other needs, all in one place.. This allowed Solidus Labs to investigate logs and metrics, while adding mission-critical context on what is happening inside their clusters, in real time.
• Improved platform reliability and customer experience: Solidus Labs can now monitor all containers inside their clusters at a much more granular level, which has a direct and immediate impact on the reliability of their platform and the positive experiences of their customers.
• eBPF traces and a modern backend for OpenTelemetry: groundcover's sensor collects traces using eBPF. These traces allowed faster and better insights for Solidus' team by instantly accessing traces for their entire stack, with zero efforts required for instrumentation or maintenance. groundcover's eBPF sensor also provides unique insight on traces, including the full payloads of traces, which in many cases has been priceless for the team.
• The technology behind groundcover: groundcover's backend includes a ClickHouse and is built on top of a Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC) architecture.

“The out-of-the-box ability of eBPF to look into the actual payload of our traces and transactions is what makes groundcover's technology and architecture superior to other tools.”

- Noam Shoeg, Director of R&D, Solidus Labs

The Impact

With groundcover, Solidus Labs fully migrated from their previous commercial cloud logging tool to a single, unified platform - improving reliability, reducing operational burden, and enabling a faster, more collaborative approach to incident response.

1. Better alignment on investigation processes: The entire team is now fully aligned on when and where to start an investigation. Even non-proficient colleagues are now able to investigate complex issues, previously rolled on to the DevOps team, with increased accountability.
2. Low maintenance, increased reliability: Moving to a fully managed backend freed the DevOps team from maintaining data ingestion pipelines and storage systems that had been part of their self-hosted observability setup. Tracing performance improved at scale, and developers gained a reliable interface they could query quickly when it mattered most.
3. Increased cost-effectiveness: Solidus Labs has a strong DevOps and engineering culture, which has allowed them to maintain OSS solutions. Moving to groundcover eliminated the need to invest time in maintaining their observability stack by moving to a fully managed backend model, still running on their infrastructure, but keeping, or even lowering, their total cost of ownership. It also removed all hidden costs, such as those occurring from maintenance and downtime recovery.

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