From Legacy Vendor Tooling to OTEL: Scaling Observability at MSCI With a Four-Person Team

This conference talk explores how a small team of just four engineers successfully migrated observability infrastructure for a 5,000-person financial services company at MSCI. Learn about their journey from traditional legacy tooling to a modern cloud-native observability stack built on OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Jaeger, Grafana, and Elasticsearch. Discover the architectural decisions, implementation strategies, and critical lessons learned while maintaining observability during the transition. Through real-world examples, see how they overcame scaling challenges, managed cultural shifts, and achieved better visibility while significantly reducing costs. Gain practical strategies for planning your own observability migration, including how to phase transitions, train teams effectively, and avoid common pitfalls. The presentation by Aftab Khan and Zach Arnold from MSCI provides valuable insights for organizations looking to modernize their observability infrastructure with limited resources.