Fixing was fast. Finding took all night.

A large UK insurer had done what most successful digital businesses do: it had grown. New services, a move to cloud and Kubernetes, a modern experience layer for customers, and more integrations between more systems. Each step made the business more capable. Collectively, they made the estate harder to see. Visibility that had once been straightforward now lived in pockets, across several monitoring tools, each owned by a different team, each watching its own corner. 

Counter-intuitively, the team was good at fixing things. Once they knew what had gone wrong, resolution was quick. The pain was everything that came before that moment. As the architecture grew more distributed, blind spots opened up between systems, the gaps where one tool's visibility ended and the next had not begun. When an incident spanned those gaps, identifying the root cause meant pulling people into a room and working through it by elimination. Mean time to identify was creeping up, even as mean time to fix stayed low.  

For claims, that was more than an operational inconvenience. When a claims journey is slow to diagnose, a technical incident can drift towards becoming a reportable one, with regulators such as the FCA, and frameworks like DORA, expecting firms to understand disruption quickly and stay within impact tolerances. The clock that matters to a regulator can start before the clock that matters to an engineer.  

For quotes, the risk was different but no less real. In a market where customers compare options in moments, a slow or failing quote journey is lost business, revenue quietly walking to a competitor, rather than a compliance exposure.  

The change was not to add another tool. It was the opposite: move from a set of siloed tools that each saw a fragment towards end-to-end visibility across the whole customer journey, with signals correlated so an issue could be traced from the customer's experience down through the services behind it. The goal was explicit and measurable: bring time to identify down, so the first question of every incident, where do we even look, had an answer in minutes rather than a war room.  

The specifics here are an insurer's, but the shape of the problem is not. Any organisation that has grown into a complex, distributed estate tends to arrive at the same place: good at fixing, slow at finding, and quietly paying for the gap every time something breaks. The lesson is not about a product. It is that when finding becomes the bottleneck, more tools make it worse, and visibility across the whole, rather than another view of a part, is what breaks the pattern.  

If finding the problem, rather than fixing it, sounds like your bottleneck, an Observability Discovery from VCG can show where your time to identify is being lost and where to close the gaps.

→ Book a free Observability Discovery | info@vcg.group | 0161 406 1820 

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