Dealer Blue Sky’s 75% savings with Better Stack
Company: Dealer Blue Sky
Dealer Blue Sky builds high-performance software solutions for automotive dealerships, helping them modernize their workflows and deliver better customer experiences. From tracking inventory to analyzing sales, their systems handle millions of transactions daily — so reliability, scalability, and visibility are key.
From the very beginning, the team made observability a core part of their infrastructure – one built on simplicity, performance, and cost-efficiency.
Industry: Automotive SaaS
Use cases: Unified observability, heartbeat monitoring, incident response
Savings: Over 75% lower monitoring costs compared to comparable setups
Switched from: Datadog
When observability becomes overkill
Before founding Dealer Blue Sky, the company’s Principal Engineer Steffan Perry had spent years managing large-scale observability stacks at a global cybersecurity firm. That experience shaped what not to do.
“Datadog was powerful, but the cost structure was unpredictable,” Steffan explains. “Every new capability was a separate add-on, and forecasting spend was nearly impossible. You’d end up cutting retention, trimming logs, or re-architecting alerts – just to stay within budget.”
When Dealer Blue Sky launched, the team wanted none of that overhead. They needed a unified, predictable, and transparent platform that could scale with their services without multiplying costs or complexity.
Starting strong with Better Stack
Instead of migrating later, Dealer Blue Sky built with Better Stack from day one. The setup was effortless – copy-and-paste installation instructions and clear documentation meant no outside support was needed.
Over the past 18 months, the company has migrated from AWS to self-managed hardware. Even with that shift, onboarding new infrastructure remains seamless: “From spinning up a new host to seeing metrics in Better Stack now takes just seconds,” Steffan notes.
Today, Dealer Blue Sky runs 12 core services, each deployed across multiple physical servers, with anywhere from 12 to 30 Docker containers per host. In that environment, pinpointing performance issues quickly is essential. Better Stack’s unified dashboards – especially the Docker overview – make it easy to spot anomalies, isolate the problem container, and resolve incidents in minutes.
Heartbeats that save time (and sanity)
One of the team’s favorite features has been Better Stack’s heartbeats. Dealer Blue Sky’s event-based architecture relies on background jobs that must trigger reliably. Previously, the team had to manually configure and test each alert in AWS CloudWatch – a tedious, error-prone process.
“With Better Stack heartbeats, we just create one in the dashboard and map it in our code. No more worrying about whether jobs triggered or not,” the team explains. “It’s a simple feature that saves hours every month.”
When every second counts
That simplicity paid off during a recent performance incident. Customers began reporting slow dashboard load times. Logs pointed to the “customers” service responding sluggishly, with intermittent timeouts.
By correlating metrics and logs side-by-side in Better Stack, the team spotted an unusually high CPU load in the “insights” service – the component responsible for data aggregation and reporting. Diving into its logs revealed the culprit: a new bug that caused excessive retries, even on successful jobs, while fetching data from the customer service.
“Having metrics, app logs, and database logs in one place made root-cause analysis straightforward. What could’ve taken hours with fragmented tools took minutes.”
Observability that’s simple, scalable, and sustainable
With Better Stack fully integrated across its stack, Dealer Blue Sky now has:
- Unified logs, metrics, alerts, and dashboards – no context switching or blind spots.
- Real-time visibility into containerized workloads, from CPU spikes to service slowdowns.
- Heartbeat monitoring that keeps event-based jobs on schedule.
- Predictable, transparent pricing – monitoring costs stay below $350/month, compared to an estimated $1,500–$1,800/month with Datadog.
Better Stack delivers an all-in-one, intuitive observability platform that saves time, cuts costs, and turns complex incidents into quick, confident resolutions.
— Dealer Blue Sky Team
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