Avis Budget Group’s public account describes a cloud-native observability effort built around open-source tools, with OpsCruise SmartLayer presented as a way to bring their signals and application context together. The available sources identify Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, and Lens, and quote Avis’s DevOps director saying deployment built on its existing monitoring stack without changes to running services. They do not publish the incidents demonstrated or measured Avis-specific results.
What Avis described in its observability journey
A Linux Foundation webinar recorded on April 26, 2022, framed Avis Budget Group’s work around business drivers for modernization and a transition to a modern cloud-native architecture. The event listing says Avis speaker Matt Surabian, then Director of DevOps Engineering for Avis Budget Group (ZipCar), would discuss the company’s experience with cloud-native observability tools and examples of application problems diagnosed through OpsCruise. The webinar was sponsored by OpsCruise, and the listing is an event description rather than a transcript. Linux Foundation webinar listing
The tools named in the listing are Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, and Lens. It presents them as examples of CNCF observability project tools in Avis’s experience; it does not provide an inventory confirming that each was deployed in production, nor does it give versions or architecture diagrams.
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What the open-source tools and OpsCruise were meant to contribute
Open-source telemetry and monitoring
The webinar description places the work in a broader cloud-native observability context, spanning visibility into metrics, logs, traces, and flows. It names Prometheus, Grafana, and Loki among the tools discussed, alongside Lens. The source does not map each tool to a specific Avis service or signal, so it supports a picture of the tools highlighted—not a detailed production topology.
A unifying layer for application context
The webinar describes OpsCruise SmartLayer as a partner layer for unifying open-source observability tools, and says the presentation would show application-problem examples diagnosed and solved with the platform powered by CNCF projects. The proposed value is not simply collecting more telemetry: it is making signals and application relationships easier to interpret together. The listing does not disclose the specific incidents, root causes, investigation steps, or outcomes of those demonstrations.
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Later vendor materials describe OpsCruise functions such as dependency discovery, contextual troubleshooting, and bringing telemetry and configuration into one view. A Cambridge Intelligence customer story about Virtana OpsCruise describes graph-based navigation across application components, with filtering and links from graph elements to dashboards. Those descriptions provide product context, not proof that every such feature was used in Avis’s 2022 deployment. Cambridge Intelligence’s Virtana OpsCruise customer story OpsCruise platform announcement
What Avis said about deployment and existing services
In OpsCruise’s 2022 Monitoring Manifesto, Surabian described the challenge of seeing how microservices fit into a larger stack and said OpsCruise built on Avis’s existing open-source monitoring stack. He added that deployment was simple and required no changes to running services. This is an attributed customer statement reproduced in vendor-published material, rather than an independently documented rollout report. OpsCruise Monitoring Manifesto
“In complex microservice architectures it can often be hard for engineering teams to see the big picture; OpsCruise provides us an affordable, engaging, and approachable view that allows engineers to see how their microservices fit into the entire stack. Most importantly, because OpsCruise is building on our existing open source monitoring stack, deploying it was simple and required no changes to our running services.”
What the public account does—and does not—establish
- Documented: the modernization and cloud-native context, the tools named by the webinar, SmartLayer’s described role in unifying open-source tools, and the customer statement about compatibility with the existing stack.
- Not documented in the webinar listing: the actual application incidents, their root causes, the diagnosis workflow, deployment architecture and versions, rollout timeline, or ongoing ownership model.
- No Avis-specific measurements are provided: the public event listing and cited vendor material do not establish changes in reliability, investigation time, staffing, resource use, or cost for Avis.
The Monitoring Manifesto also cites improvements of up to 50% in SRE-to-developer ratios and use of up to 20% fewer resources without impacting performance or risk. OpsCruise presents these as organization-level results; the cited passage does not attribute them to Avis or provide enough methodology to treat them as independently validated Avis outcomes. They should not be read as measurements from this case.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.How to interpret the case
The strongest supported takeaway is an integration approach: keep an existing open-source monitoring foundation, then add a layer intended to make telemetry and application relationships more navigable. For teams considering a similar pattern, the relevant questions are whether the layer works with their current tools and signals, how much instrumentation or service change it requires, whether it helps troubleshoot in dependency context, and what operational effort it adds or removes. Avis’s quote supports its stated compatibility experience, but the public account does not quantify cost or provide enough detail to answer those questions for other environments.
Avis has also been the subject of a separate modernization account about its Rate Shop application and cloud migration. That work is distinct from the OpsCruise observability webinar and should not be treated as part of its technical architecture. TCS’s Rate Shop modernization case study
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