Storio group protects €4.5 million peak trading revenue with Dynatrace

Storio group is Europe’s leading photo gifting business, formed through the merger of Albelli and Photobox in 2021. The group enables customers to create personalised photo products that capture life’s most important moments. During peak trading periods, Storio processes as much as €1.5 million per hour in revenue. Digital customer experience is critical during these sales moments, as even a brief disruption to their journey can have a significant impact on revenue.

Following the merger, Storio group undertook a multi-year technology transformation to consolidate five ecommerce platforms into a single shared microservices-based architecture on AWS. As its ecommerce platform matured, the company identified an opportunity to better support peak trading periods by modernizing its observability strategy. Storio wanted to ensure teams were the first to know when problems arose, so they could continue delivering high-quality online experiences. At the same time, it wanted to reduce the time teams spent reactively fixing issues, giving engineers more space to create new value for customers.

Storio group selected Dynatrace to support its observability modernization strategy. By bringing logs, metrics and traces together in a single platform, Dynatrace removed the need for manual correlation and made it easier for teams to investigate and resolve issues collaboratively. Integration across Storio group’s AWS-based environment, leveraging native OpenTelemetry standards, ensures observability data is captured consistently, at scale. Dynatrace Intelligence then helps teams detect abnormal behaviour early, pinpoint root causes, and act quickly – before issues impact customers or revenue.

“Before Dynatrace, manually correlating logs across our environment was a Sisyphean task that was never ending. It was agonizing pushing the same rock uphill every day,” said Alex Hibbitt, Engineering Director, Customer Platform, Storio group. “Dynatrace automates that work, so our engineers are the first to know when trouble is brewing and can act quickly. That helps us to keep our services running without friction, even during peak trading periods – which is vital for preserving revenue and customer trust in our brand.”

• Proactive problem identification: Automated baselining and Dynatrace Intelligence enable emerging issues to be identified across services, often before the business is affected. By pinpointing root causes and showing where intervention is needed, teams can move quickly from detection to resolution, reducing the risk of performance problems escalating and impacting customers or revenue.

• Revenue assurance: During Storio group’s busiest trading periods, platform performance has a direct and immediate impact on revenue. Over one Black Sunday weekend, three previously unseen issues were detected before they became customer-impacting. This early visibility allowed engineers to intervene quickly, avoid widespread disruption, and protect up to €4.5 million in revenue at a critical point in the trading calendar.

• Consolidated platform: Dynatrace Grail brings logs, metrics and traces together to create a single source of truth across Storio’s distributed environment. Engineers can analyse more than 1.1 billion daily log events in context, alongside service dependencies and infrastructure metrics, making it easier to understand how issues develop and propagate without manual correlation or fragmented dashboards.

• Reliable digital journeys: By removing the need to manually sift through logs, data, and dashboards, engineering time can be redirected from day-to-day platform management. Teams can focus on building and improving customer-facing features to support more consistent and reliable digital journeys, particularly during high-pressure gifting periods.

“What I love most about Dynatrace is it’s our early warning system. It allows us to identify problems early, fix them quickly, and deliver a better customer experience,” continued Hibbitt. “That means our engineers can focus on what they should be doing – building great customer experiences, rather than scraping through logs to keep our photo-gifting platform stable. It’s like having super powers. Dynatrace gives us foresight and lets us focus on the things that make our business tick.”