How Teamwork.com eliminated logging chaos, reduced MTTR from days to hours and freed up their engineering team with Bronto
Teamwork.com transformed their fragmented logging infrastructure — spanning 5–8 different tools across multiple AWS regions — into a unified, cost-effective solution with Bronto. The result: 365-day retention, sub-second searches across terabytes of data, AI-powered insights, and engineering teams free to focus on product instead of logging infrastructure.
What Bronto did for Teamwork.com
42%
Lower total cost of ownership
365 days
Hot retention across all logs
<1s
Search across terabytes of data
2.2 FTE
Engineering time freed up
Business context
Teamwork.com is the AI-powered project management and resource management platform serving over 20,000 companies worldwide. Their platform — including Projects, Desk, Chat, Spaces, and CRM — is deployed across staging, US, and EU AWS regions. This distributed architecture generates massive log volumes, but their fragmented logging ecosystem was holding them back.
With engineering teams distributed globally and a growing cloud-native development environment, Teamwork.com needed complete visibility into their systems. Instead, their SysOps team was constantly fighting a battle against cost, complexity, and coverage limitations.
Before: an operational burden
In common with many organizations that have enjoyed rapid growth, Teamwork.com's logging infrastructure was a disparate set of solutions, each solving part of the problem while creating new ones:
- Self-hosted Graylog (multiple clusters across regions) for application logs
- AWS CloudWatch
- AWS CloudTrail
- ClickHouse + Superset for audit logs (implemented to escape CloudWatch costs)
- S3 buckets for traffic logs with painful Athena queries
- Prometheus for metrics that should have been logs
On top of significant AWS infrastructure costs, the team felt the productivity hit too: constant Graylog and Elasticsearch maintenance, developers asking "where are my logs?" daily, longer MTTR from missing data, and architectural constraints that pushed teams away from comprehensive logging.
The Bronto solution: from chaos to clarity
Bronto replaced Teamwork.com's entire collection of logging solutions with a single, unified platform that just works:
- All logs in one place: application, infrastructure, audit, CDN, streaming
- Any format accepted — no parsing rules, regex patterns, or index templates
- Zero maintenance — fully managed SaaS eliminated operational overhead
- Multi-region support with centralized visibility across staging, US, and EU
- 12 months of hot data, removing the need for Athena on archived S3 buckets
- Full logging coverage no longer constrained by cost or scale
- Faster MTTR: issues that used to take days are now resolved in hours
Business impact
| Before Bronto | After Bronto |
|---|---|
| Limited retention | Standard 90-day retention across all data, up to 12 months for high-volume logs — investigate months later, analyze trends, meet compliance |
| 30+ minute queries that often failed | Sub-second: ~602ms average across queries from hundreds of GB up to 10TB. ~30 daily active engineers proactively use logs |
| Frequent outages, missing logs, gaps in coverage | 100% availability with up to 12 months retention — logs always available during incidents and long-term investigations |
| Coverage constrained by prohibitive cost | 100% coverage, including high-volume streaming workloads |
| 3 engineers, part-time, maintaining infra | Zero overhead — team focuses on building product, not managing infra |
| Complex parsers required | Custom parsing handled — no rules to write or maintain |
Total cost of ownership
Bronto proved 42% cheaper than running their previous mix of home-grown solutions, on software and services alone. When Teamwork.com evaluated alternatives, SaaS competitors were up to 10x more expensive than Bronto with only 30 days of retention.
The resources required to maintain disparate logging systems also dropped dramatically: 0.4 FTE for Graylog maintenance, 0.3 FTE for index/parsing management, and 1.5 FTE across all engineers troubleshooting log availability — a total of 2.2 FTE freed, worth roughly €132,000 annually.
New capabilities unlocked
An order-of-magnitude increase in retention opened up new analytical use cases. Teamwork can now identify performance degradation patterns over months, trace customer issues back to their true origins, and base capacity planning on historical data. Compliance audits that once required complex archive retrieval became simple searches.
When incidents strike, BrontoScope, Bronto's AI-powered error investigator, surfaces root causes in seconds by analyzing millions of logs. Bronto's Usage Explorer gave control back to the SRE team — team and service-level visibility into log volumes has been a game-changer for understanding which logs are most valuable. In one case, debug logs were accidentally turned on in production and the responsible team was notified right away, preventing a sustained spike in low-value log volume.
The impact rippled beyond engineering. Customer Support investigates issues themselves using documented workflows instead of filing tickets. Product managers access performance metrics through purpose-built dashboards. Time from customer complaint to insight dropped from hours or days to minutes.
Bronto fundamentally changed how we think about logging. We went from treating logs as a necessary evil — expensive, unreliable, and limited — to making them a key asset. The combination of unlimited retention, lightning-fast search, and AI-powered insights means we catch issues much earlier, often before customers notice them. But the real transformation is cultural: every team now has access to the data they need, when they need it.
Paul Griffin
Head of Platform Engineering, Teamwork.com
The TCO reduction is significant — we're saving hundreds of thousands annually. But the real value is in new and significantly enhanced capabilities. A significant reduction in time to root cause, investigating issues from months ago, having logs actually available during incidents — these aren't just improvements, they're game-changers. Our SysOps team now get to work on platform innovation instead of keeping Graylog alive.
Aodh O'Mahony
Engineering Manager, Teamwork.com
See how Bronto can replace 5+ tools, cut TCO, and give you 365-day retention on your own data.
