Renewi deploys Elastic Observability to optimize the performance of business-critical applications

Leading European waste recycling management company monitors availability and performance of apps with Elastic Observability on Elastic Cloud on Azure

Waste recycling plays a central role in tackling climate change by reducing methane produced by landfill and incineration sites. This is also the goal of Renewi, an ambitious waste management business that has an industry-leading recycling rate of 65%, with a goal to reach 75% by 2025.

Renewi primarily operates in the Benelux region of Europe. The company collects recyclable waste and uses it to create raw materials such as paper, metal, plastic, glass, wood, and building materials.

Renewi is equally committed to the efficient use of resources when it comes to managing its information technology systems. This is where Erik Meeuwsen, IT Service Manager, and his team play a critical role in maintaining the company’s databases, networks, and middleware. They are also responsible for the functional monitoring of Renewi’s business-critical applications, helping to keep software such as the company’s Salesforce CRM system running smoothly and without interruption.

This success story in a nutshell

Renewi can now track application messaging, set up error alerts, and quickly resolve issues using Elastic Observability.

Employees can monitor application messaging with user-friendly dashboards that are easy to set up in Elastic.

Renewi can unify logs, metrics, uptime data, and traces from multiple applications and add new ones quickly with Elastic Observability.

Moving to Elastic Cloud to increase ROI, lower energy consumption

Renewi previously used a solution built in-house to monitor functionality, find the root cause, and fix application issues. However, the software couldn’t easily be updated, and the technology lacked a comprehensive support framework. Meeuwsen was also concerned about vulnerabilities in the code. “We wanted to modernize and improve our approach to monitoring middleware and app functionality,” he says.

In addition, Meeuwsen wanted to better support Renewi’s mission to be the leading waste-to-product company in one of the world’s most advanced circular economics regions. “Our job is to keep the organization running so that it can focus on the delivery of innovative recycling and waste disposal services, he says.”

Meeuwsen and his team reached out to Rob van der Heiden, account executive at Devoteam, Renewi’s long-term technology partner. Devoteam put together a proof of concept based on Elastic Observability which unifies logs, metrics, application traces, and availability data from multiple sources. It also includes a set of easy-to-use dashboards for data visualization and analysis which can be quickly configured to the needs of different teams.

“We replicated the functionality of our previous solution very quickly with Elastic Observability. Additionally, we can extend it to ingest and transform data from new applications and sources with minimal effort.”

Renewi also needed to select an Elastic deployment environment. To help them with this decision, Van der Heiden demonstrated an on-premises configuration alongside a deployment running on Elastic Cloud on Azure.

“When we demonstrated the Elastic proof of concepts, it quickly became clear that the Elastic Cloud deployment was better aligned with Renewi’s IT strategy. It means that they no longer need to be involved with the day-to-day maintenance of the technology and can instead focus resources on developing innovative applications for Renewi customers and employees.”rn

Selecting a cloud-based solution enables Renewi to move more of its IT infrastructure from a capital expense to a more cost-effective operating expense. This also makes IT budgets more predictable so Renewi can plan for IT costs into the future.

“Moving to the cloud not only increases our IT return on investment, it also helps us reduce energy consumption and our overall carbon footprint. As a waste management company, it’s important that we lead by example and Elastic Cloud helps send a sustainability message to our customers and investors.”rn

Easy-to-use dashboards for non-technical users

Elastic Observability has been well received by Renewi end-user teams, the majority of whom are responsible for the performance of business applications including Salesforce and a new customer portal called MyRenewi.

These non-technical teams are confident that messages from their applications are flowing through Renewi’s middleware to other parts of the infrastructure. They now receive an alert as soon as any messaging errors occur.

This is important if, for example, a customer is having trouble logging on to the MyRenewi customer portal or ordering a product. Alerts help teams address issues faster, with minimal impact on the customer experience and company revenue. It’s also helpful to Renewi’s human resources team which now has a dashboard that provides an overview of the status of messages behind their HR-related apps, so they know they’re working properly.

In addition to accelerating fault detection and resolution, Elastic Observability helps break down barriers that occur when applications are isolated within siloes. Different teams are now more aware of business-critical interactions between their applications and other tools.

“Elastic Observability enables non-technical people such as functional managers to track application messaging and ensure that it reaches the destination successfully. For each team, we’ve created a dedicated space on Elastic where they can view dashboards that alert them to important messaging events.”

Devoteam as a strategic IT partner for Renewi

Meeuwsen stresses the value of working with a technology partner that has a deep understanding of Elastic Observability and a strong connection with the Elastic support team.

“With Devoteam, we have a partner that can step right in if there is an issue. They have a deep understanding of Elastic’s technology and if they don’t know the answer, they have a direct relationship with Elastic for additional support.”

A platform for the future

With positive feedback to Elastic from employees across the organization, Meeuwsen sees enormous potential for Elastic Observability to support other key business applications including ServiceNow, Renewi’s IT service management (ITSM) platform. Elastic Observability will enable Renewi to standardize and streamline ServiceNow incident management workflows and automatically forward Elastic alerts to the appropriate team for resolution.

Renewi is also looking to expand its Elastic Observability deployment with end-to-end monitoring. This means that in addition to message status tracking, it will be able to monitor the message at every step of its journey from application to application. Other Elastic capabilities of interest include Searchable Snapshots for quickly searching infrequently accessed data and helping to reduce storage and operating costs.

“The great advantage of Elastic Observability on Elastic Cloud is that existing functionality monitoring can be replicated quickly while increasing data and event transparency across other applications. Ultimately, it means we can support the business with a cloud-based system that is more cost-effective and sustainable than an on-premise solution.”