Lunar is a Nordic bank with more than 700,000 users in Denmark, Sweden and Norway. Founded in 2015, Lunar strives to change banking for the better so its users can control their spending, save smarter and make their money grow.

As a company born in the cloud, Lunar isn’t tied down by legacy technology and believes banking customers shouldn’t be either. The fintech firm is a strong example of an industry disruptor, innovating the Nordic financial services industry with digital-only transactions.

Back in 2017, with 20+ production deployments per day, Lunar required a modern log management platform that could keep up with the demands of its steady development and deployment schedule. It found what it needed in CrowdStrike Falcon® LogScale.

Outgrowing its Open-Source Log Management Platform

Lunar began its log management journey with a simple Elasticsearch and Kibana setup. However, it didn’t take long for issues to surface with the usability and compatibility of the open-source solution. The Elasticsearch query language was problematic, and Kibana always caused difficulties, according to Kasper Nissen, Lead Platform Architect at Lunar.

“We had an issue where schemas were defined on the first request every night, which ultimately meant that we couldn’t see what was going on with one of our mobile platforms,” said Nissen. “This created blindspots and led to a bad developer experience.”

Lunar set out to fix these issues, starting with the developer experience. In 2017, the bank was starting to work with microservices. In order to decentralize the management of these microservices to developers, the team needed to give developers a modern log management platform to easily pull the logs they needed. That’s when Lunar turned to Falcon LogScale.

Falcon LogScale is a modern log management platform that allows organizations to explore threats, identify system vulnerabilities and gain valuable insights from all log and event data in real time. Falcon LogScale offers a low total cost of ownership through an architecture designed to minimize the storage and computing resources required to ingest data at any scale — and then provide instant insights into that data with low search latency.

“The query language of LogScale is what drew us in because it’s so good for developers,” said Nissen. “It works well self-hosted and doesn’t require a schema to start ingesting logs.”

Today, by using Falcon LogScale to manage its logs to examine both application and infrastructure- layer data, Lunar gets a log management platform that provides a complete view of its 300-350 different microservices. Falcon LogScale gives Lunar the collation of events both up and downstream, providing insights to prevent issues before they occur.

Additionally, when testing new application functionality on iOS or Android, developers at Lunar use Falcon LogScale to get instant feedback on what’s going right or wrong with a piece of code before it goes to production.

“LogScale allows for rapid turnaround and a shorter development cycle, which in turn means more features and fixes in less time,” said Nissen.

Supporting a Rapidly Growing Company

Lunar knew modern DevOps ideas and infrastructure were needed to redefine the developer experience. Falcon LogScale is part of that journey.

Scale and speed were critical pieces of the puzzle. After adopting Falcon LogScale, Lunar quickly scaled from 100 to 450 employees. But unlike the previous log management platform, which forced the company to make tradeoffs on what to log, the modern architecture of Falcon LogScale allows Lunar to “log everything,” driving several benefits.

“Previously, we thought a lot about what we logged because the system didn’t handle it well,” said Nissen. “Now we log everything and developers can ask questions about their code after deploying it, once they know the questions. I couldn’t think of a better way to answer those questions than to throw them at LogScale.”

Searches are much faster as well, noted Nissen. “The live queries are such a simple thing … when the logs appear in the backend, they’re presented to us right away. The delay is so small that our developers feel like it’s instant.”

All told, what started as a monitoring and troubleshooting tool has blossomed into much more. Today, Falcon LogScale also helps Lunar with compliance use cases because it allows internal auditors to easily access the logs they need, rather than wait for someone else to pull them. Customer experience has improved as well, as teams can see and resolve app issues before customers do, ensuring external systems are always running smoothly.

“LogScale just works for us,” concluded Nissen. “It answers all the questions we have.”