Skyscanner’s journey to effective observability
Article Summary
Skyscanner was drowning in observability chaos: multiple vendors, fragmented tools, and engineers losing confidence in their ability to debug production issues.
During COVID-19, Skyscanner's platform team seized the opportunity to completely overhaul their observability stack. They migrated 300+ microservices from a patchwork of specialized vendors and internal systems to a unified approach built on open standards.
Key Takeaways
- Standardized on OpenTelemetry and New Relic to eliminate context switching across tools
- Migrated 300+ microservices in weeks using automated PRs via Turbolift
- Teams reduced telemetry costs by 90% using smart sampling on 2M spans/second
- Created Observability Ambassadors program to drive cultural adoption across teams
- Shifted SLOs from API metrics to actual user experience signals
Critical Insight
Skyscanner transformed observability from a technical burden into a sociotechnical tool that connects 110M travelers to 1,200+ partners with data-driven confidence.
