How Avatar Achieved SOC 2 Compliance, Improved Uptime, and Saved Costs with OpenObserve
June 05, 2025
6 min read
About Avatar
Avatar is a transportation technology company that provides an all-in-one platform for motor carriers to recruit, hire, train, and retain safe drivers. Avatar operates a distributed infrastructure platform that requires robust monitoring and compliance capabilities. As a growing company pursuing enterprise-level security standards, Avatar needed to achieve SOC 2 Type II compliance while maintaining operational efficiency across their interconnected systems. The company hired Graham Brooks, Senior Security & Systems Engineer, in April 2024 specifically to address infrastructure improvements necessary for SOC 2 compliance and enhanced observability.
The Challenge
When Graham Brooks joined Avatar in April 2024, the company faced critical engineering challenges that threatened both operational efficiency and compliance goals. Avatar's logging system was entirely device-specific, with each component maintaining local logs in local filesystems, S3 buckets, and CloudWatch Logs, depending on the service. This fragmented approach created significant operational friction, as engineers were forced to SSH into multiple servers just to collect log data for basic troubleshooting activities.
The situation became even more problematic when considering Avatar's distributed infrastructure architecture. While the company had successfully implemented a well-managed distributed system, the lack of consolidated logging made diagnosing issues across interconnected systems a time-consuming and frustrating process. This complexity directly impacted both system reliability and team productivity, as what should have been straightforward troubleshooting tasks required accessing two or three different servers to gather all relevant log information.
Perhaps most critically, the existing logging setup was completely incompatible with SOC 2 Type II compliance requirements, creating a significant business risk that demanded immediate resolution. As the primary reason for Brooks' hiring was to achieve this compliance, the logging infrastructure represented a fundamental roadblock to the company's strategic objectives. Adding to these challenges, Brooks needed a solution that wouldn't require months of specialized training or dedicated team members to manage effectively, given his role as a versatile infrastructure expert handling security, cloud infrastructure, and compliance responsibilities simultaneously.
The Solution with OpenObserve
After evaluating multiple observability platforms including DataDog and New Relic, Avatar selected OpenObserve based on its unique ability to address their specific constraints and requirements. The primary differentiator was OpenObserve's use of standard SQL rather than proprietary query languages, which meant Brooks could leverage his existing expertise instead of investing months in platform-specific training. “OpenObserve is that sweet spot product with a ton of functionality but it’s approachable. I didn't feel like there was this huge barrier to entry to learn how to use the product before I could actually use the product” Brooks stated. This accessibility factor was crucial given his role as a jack-of-all-trades expert who needed to remain effective across security, infrastructure, and compliance domains.
"OpenObserve is that sweet spot product with a ton of functionality but it’s approachable. I didn’t feel like there was this huge barrier to entry to learn how to use the product before I could actually use the product”
Beyond accessibility, OpenObserve's flexible architecture perfectly fits Avatar's custom requirements. While other platforms offered rigid integrations that worked well within predefined parameters, OpenObserve provided a simple pipeline that could ingest any type of data, giving the team creative liberty to build bespoke functionality. This flexibility enabled Avatar to develop custom solutions like a vulnerability monitoring system that automatically sends Slack notifications for critical AWS Systems Manager alerts, functionality that would have been challenging to implement with more restrictive platforms.
The selection process was further influenced by OpenObserve's exceptional customer support culture, which stood in stark contrast to the complex support processes of larger competitors. The responsiveness of the OpenObserve team, including direct founder engagement and rapid problem resolution, provided confidence that Avatar could successfully implement and maintain their new observability infrastructure.
Additionally, OpenObserve's impressive data compression capabilities and cost-effective architecture, allowed Avatar to achieve both great performance and remaining efficient at scale. Graham stated “The compression on OpenObserve is ludicrous. I don't know how you guys do it, but it's very impressive.” which meant the company could process terabytes of daily data at a fraction of the cost compared to alternatives like New Relic, making it both technically and financially attractive.
“The compression on OpenObserve is ludicrous. I don't know how you guys do it, but it's very impressive.”
Key Results
OpenObserve helped Avatar up-level and consolidate their observability strategy to a single pane of glass, providing comprehensive visibility from individual Docker containers all the way down to base AWS infrastructure. This unified monitoring eliminated the previous need to access multiple servers for troubleshooting, while the platform's fast query performance and intuitive visual formatting options enabled rapid problem diagnosis and resolution. The ability to see every aspect of Avatar's infrastructure in one place, combined with real-time alerting capabilities, fundamentally changed how the team approached system monitoring and maintenance. The operational improvements translated directly into measurable reliability gains. Avatar identified patterns in system failures that had previously gone unnoticed, including the discovery that specific AWS instance classes were crashing under high CPU utilization events. By unifying the AWS instance classes to the hardware specification that was not experiencing utilization-based outages, the company resolved that cause of system instability. Furthermore, being able to review the full set of application server CPU usage in a single pane of glass made it immediately obvious which instances were part of the outage pattern and which were not. By resolving these underlying issues, the company achieved a significant improvement in application server availability from 99.95% to 99.99%.
Perhaps most importantly for Avatar's strategic objectives, their new observability setup successfully passed SOC 2 Type II audit requirements. “One of the mileposts we had to get through was that observability needs to make sense, needs to be well documented, and needs to be compliant. We had our auditors audit us … and we passed with flying colors using OpenObserve. “ stated Brooks.
Summary
Avatar's partnership with OpenObserve successfully addressed critical infrastructure challenges while enabling business growth through compliance achievement. OpenObserve’s platform proved to be accessible, flexible, and cost-effective to provide Avatar enterprise-grade observability without the complexity and expense typically associated with such solutions. By choosing OpenObserve, Avatar not only solved immediate compliance and operational challenges but also established a foundation for scalable infrastructure monitoring that supports their continued growth and reliability objectives.
