Nordic insurer guarantees DevOps quality with cloud-based monitoring and governance

If you live in Northern Europe and need property or casualty insurance, then If is just what you’re looking for. If Insurance has 3.7 million customers in the Nordic and Baltic regions, ranging from private individuals to large corporations, and it handles more than 1.4 million claims annually. The company prides itself on fast and effective customer service, and half of those claims are handled within 24 hours of reporting.

To be a customer service leader, If must stay on the leading edge of technology and ensure that its employees have access to the tools they need to meet customer expectations. “Our journey started with a commitment to the cloud, and we chose Microsoft Azure as our platform,” says Rickard Öh, Cloud Solution Architect and Azure Platform Responsible at If Insurance. “By moving resources from on-premises to the cloud, we can focus on delivering value to our customers instead of managing our IT infrastructure.”

Delivering Monitoring as a Service

Over the course of its five-year cloud journey, If has significantly increased its cloud investment. The Azure ecosystem now includes 90 production systems, 600 virtual machines, 500 Azure App Service plans, and a collection of Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) clusters. As its cloud landscape has grown more complex, the company saw a need to improve application monitoring in a way that could accommodate a wide range of development teams.

“We have about 35 DevOps teams today, and close to 400 developers,” explains Öh. “We had a centralized monitoring team that was becoming a bottleneck as it tried to address the needs of all the development groups. As a result, we had systems that weren’t sufficiently monitored and logged through development and test—and that can lead to bugs and performance issues in production systems.”

Öh and his team at the company’s Cloud & DevOps Center of Excellence wanted to move monitoring closer to DevOps, not only to streamline processes, but to get developers thinking more about monitoring. So they embarked on what they call the Monitoring as a Service project. Because If was well-versed in Azure by this point, the monitoring team sought tools that developers could access through the Azure portal and integrate with Microsoft Visual Studio and Azure DevOps. The solution they found was Azure Monitor, which includes Application Insights.

“We see the cloud and Azure as our future, and from an architectural perspective, we’re moving toward more PaaS offerings and a serverless strategy, so we needed a solution that would fit with those plans,” says Öh. “Azure Monitor was the perfect choice for us. It’s a first-class monitoring tool that allows us to be productive and innovative in the cloud. It works with our PaaS offerings and gives us end-to-end monitoring of all our Azure services and on-premises systems.”

Bringing developers on board with new tools

The Monitoring as a Service project didn’t end with the choice of the right tool. The team still needed to get the DevOps groups on board. Communication has been a key factor in the success so far.

When development teams want to migrate an application to the cloud or build a new cloud solution, they need to go through a cloud approval process. “As part of that process, we bring monitoring into the discussion and talk about the general benefits of having a robust application performance management tool,” says Öh. “We recommend that they use Azure Monitor and its capabilities like Application Insights, Container Insights, Virtual Machine Insights, and Log Analytics, and we make sure they know what the product suite can do and how to best configure it for each environment and service. We try hard to set them up for success.”

The company’s DevOps groups have found that Azure Monitor offers many features to make their jobs easier. One example is the Application Map, included with Application Insights application performance management, which helps developers quickly troubleshoot performance bottlenecks or component failures across a distributed application. When the system raises an alert, developers can drill down to determine which service caused the exception, and if necessary, developers can drill even deeper down into stack traces and custom logging. Developers use Azure Monitor Logs to dig into specific problems and see all of the data related to an issue.

“What’s great is that you get an end-to-end transaction view through Application Map, and you can follow a call between different Application Insights resources,” says Öh. “We’ve tried to make Azure Monitor even more appealing by creating good dashboards that include an application’s Live Metrics Stream. We’ve found that this gets developers excited about delivering—and monitoring—a high-quality production product. They also appreciate the extremely easy onboarding process in Microsoft Visual Studio to get automated logging and monitoring up and running. That used to take us days in the past.”

Combining services for robust governance and security

One of the strengths of the If Azure-based cloud strategy is the way that different Azure solutions can provide even more value when combined together. An example of this is the company’s cloud governance, which includes multiple Azure services to protect its systems, including Azure Security Center and Microsoft Azure Policy.

“We want to give our developers as much freedom as possible within the Azure environment, but we still need to make sure they’re doing the right thing,” explains Öh. “We’re using Azure Policy, along with Azure Monitor logs, to keep an eye on things like virtual machines with public IP addresses. If we detect a problem, we work to educate the developer on best practices.”

Moving forward, If plans to expand its Monitoring as a Service program to include AKS clusters and to extend its governance work to take better advantage of Azure Security Center configuration options as more on-premises workloads migrate to the cloud. The monitoring team will continue to play a key role in getting all developers on board. “Azure Monitor will help If to maximize DevOps productivity, which leads to better services for our customers at a faster pace,” says Kjell Rune Tveita, CIO at If Insurance.

“At the beginning, some developers were hesitant to use Azure Monitor—particularly our Java developers,” says Öh. “But when we teach them that Azure isn’t a Microsoft .NET cloud, and it works with almost any programming language, they start to get interested. And when they see that everything in Azure fits together so seamlessly, that usually seals the deal. Azure DevOps is a great platform for building a solid build-and-release pipeline that increases developer productivity, improves production application quality, and ultimately drives better service for our customers.”

While If is using Azure services to improve its DevOps processes, the company is seeing valuable business benefits as well. “The insights we gain from the Azure toolset enables us to make more data-driven decisions,” explains Öh. “The overall advantages within DevOps—finding bugs sooner and keeping them from getting to production, solving production issues faster, and easily pinpointing the source of problems—keep our business running more smoothly and help us better serve our customers. The easy provisioning and monitoring of cloud resources also enables us to scale up and down quickly, which decreases our overall cloud spend, which is great for any business.”

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