How WindBorne fixes weather balloons mid-flight from its logs
WindBorne Systems designs, builds and flies a global fleet of autonomous, long-duration weather balloons that collect atmospheric data from places nothing else reaches. The flight control logs, satellite commands and infrastructure metrics behind that fleet now land in one place, so engineers can diagnose a balloon and fix it while it is still flying.
- Industry
- Atmospheric data
- Products used
- Logs, metrics
- Switched from
- In-house monitoring
A fleet you cannot walk up to
Every balloon is a high-value asset in the stratosphere, and the data it collects is the product. WindBorne's cloud infrastructure runs flight control, data ingestion and the APIs that stakeholders depend on. As the fleet grew, the team's mix of fragmented and in-house monitoring stopped scaling.
“With a globally distributed, 24/7 running autonomous system, you need to know what's going on at all times.”
One view of the fleet, built on Render
WindBorne streams all of its service logs into Better Stack, tightly integrated with its Render infrastructure. When Render shipped OpenTelemetry metrics streaming, the team added CPU and RAM utilization alongside those logs, so performance metrics and system behavior sit in the same view instead of in two tools.
The balloon that was venting gas wrong
Balloons control altitude by venting gas. After the team switched from a larger balloon envelope to a smaller one, the control algorithm did not adjust correctly, and the altitude behavior was off.
The team went to the logs and tracked when and where commands had been sent to the balloon over satellite communications. That showed the envelope setting was not being applied at the expected time. They fixed it while the balloon was still flying.
What changed
Flight control logs, satellite commands and balloon performance metrics all stream into one live overview of the global operation. When a balloon behaves unexpectedly, engineers can tell a control algorithm bug from a faulty sensor reading by reading the logs, and can intervene while the flight is still in progress rather than losing the mission.
“By exploring logs in Better Stack, we tracked down when and where messages were being sent to the balloon over satellite communications. That's how we discovered the envelope setting wasn't being applied at the expected time, and were able to fix the issue.”
Logs, metrics and incidents in one platform, wherever your infrastructure runs.