Cencosud's Observability Center Accelerates Business Transformation

Cencosud, one of Latin America's largest business conglomerates with supermarkets, department stores, shopping centers, and home improvement centers across five countries, embarked on a digital transformation journey to enhance customer experiences and modernize operations. Recognizing the need for a unified approach to managing their diverse infrastructure and applications, Cencosud sought to create an observability center that would accelerate their business transformation across Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, and Peru.

The challenge lay in establishing a common observability culture across different countries, each with unique cultural approaches and varying levels of maturity. To address this, Cencosud created Cencommerce, an internal startup-like team focused on agile and product-oriented methodologies. Cencommerce's initial focus was on implementing common observability tooling to measure the impact of online applications. By demonstrating the business value of high-performance digital interactions, the team rapidly expanded, fostering a data-driven decision-making process.

Engineering Director Pablo José Duran Rojas spearheaded the implementation of a unified observability framework, leveraging New Relic as the common platform. The framework established three levels of activity: gathering information using application performance management, monitoring KPIs based on team requirements, and standardizing metrics using golden signals (latency, error rate, saturation, and traffic). This approach provided a clear path to maturity in observability activities, enabling teams to proactively address anomalies and optimize application performance.

With the observability framework in place, Cencosud established a robust structure that utilizes predictive and threshold alerts to identify and address performance issues in real-time. This proactive and responsive approach has enabled the company to continuously improve performance, optimize infrastructure support, and ensure seamless customer experiences across both modern and legacy applications. The integration of New Relic with AWS products and features further streamlined monitoring across their cloud infrastructure, contributing to the overall success of their digital transformation.

Value Results:

• Accelerated Digital Transformation: By creating a common observability culture and tooling, Cencosud accelerated its digital transformation across five countries.

• Improved Customer Experience: The focus on high-performance, fast, and seamless digital customer interactions led to enhanced customer experiences.

• Enhanced Team Collaboration: The observability framework fostered better communication and a sense of shared identity among Cencommerce team members.

• Proactive Issue Resolution: Predictive and threshold alerts enabled teams to proactively address performance issues and optimize infrastructure support.

• Data-Driven Decision Making: The observability platform provided valuable insights that informed data-driven decisions, optimizing resource allocation and application performance.