Federated Mutual insurance builds a unified view across hybrid cloud and Kubernetes stack with Dynatrace

Federated Mutual Insurance Company prides itself on its relationship-driven, face-to-face approach to insurance and risk management. Established more than 120 years ago, the company has evolved its technology estate to support modern operations, now spanning more than 1,400 virtual machines and 23 Kubernetes clusters. As the environment continued to scale, monitoring became increasingly distributed, supported by seven tools, which limited end-to-end visibility. Log management costs also restricted how much system data could be analyzed, making it difficult to keep pace with growth and rising demands for innovation.

Federated Mutual identified an opportunity to strengthen its observability strategy and better align it with the scale of its operations. Its priorities included extending coverage across Windows environments, increasing host visibility beyond 31%, and expanding synthetic monitoring across critical applications. Modernizing its observability practices in this way would accelerate issue detection and enable more automation, reducing reliance on manual checks and reactive processes while creating a more proactive, resilient foundation for IT operations.

Federated Mutual selected Dynatrace to consolidate its fragmented monitoring landscape into a single, unified platform and gain real-time visibility across its environment. The ability to quickly instrument three of its most challenging systems was a key differentiator, with teams able to gain full visibility into one critical application in under 80 minutes during the initial proof of concept. This early success, combined with ease of deployment, AI-driven insights, and responsive live support, gave Federated Mutual the confidence to accelerate adoption and embed observability as a core capability across its IT operations.

“The turning point came when Dynatrace detected a major incident not long into our initial rollout,” said John Salo, Site Reliability Engineer, Federated Mutual Insurance Company. “That demonstrated clear value to the business and helped secure the buy-in we needed to move faster. Leadership wanted Dynatrace everywhere as quickly as possible, reducing our production timeline from six months to just two through close collaboration with the Dynatrace team.”

• Greater operational efficiency: With full-stack visibility across its environment, Federated Mutual can now identify issues significantly earlier. During one major incident, Dynatrace enabled detection within 20 minutes, limiting the impact of downtime. Expanded coverage, including a 249% increase in monitored hosts and 254% increase in synthetic monitors across critical applications, allows teams to proactively detect and address issues before users are affected.

• Reduced tool sprawl: Dynatrace has enabled Federated Mutual to consolidate its monitoring landscape from seven legacy tools to one single source of truth across its IT environment. This simplification reduces the need for teams to switch between platforms, improving efficiency and enabling more consistent workflows. Dedicated observability engineers now work closely with developers to define standards, deliver training, and support adoption across the organization.

• Increased automation: By introducing Dynatrace-driven workflows, Federated Mutual has reduced reliance on manual intervention for routine operational tasks. Automated processes can now restart failed hosts and services, helping to maintain system stability without requiring constant oversight. This shift allows teams to spend less time on repetitive checks and more time improving performance and resilience across the environment.

• Improved user experience insight: Through the combined use of real user monitoring, session replay, and synthetic testing, teams gain deeper visibility into customer experience and application performance. This enables developers to understand how users interact with services, identify friction points, and resolve issues more effectively. As a result, the organization can deliver more reliable and consistent digital experiences while continuing to expand its observability capabilities.

“Dynatrace has enabled us to instrument three of our most complex systems that other platforms simply couldn’t handle,” said Aqil Lakha, Site Reliability Engineer, Federated Mutual Insurance Company. “We now have full visibility across areas that were previously out of reach, which has helped us move from reacting to problems to managing our systems in a far more proactive and controlled way. Dynatrace has already impressed, our next step is to work closely with its team to quantify how observability supports business outcomes so we can continue to engage executives in their own language.”