From 1.16 BillionReactive Logs A Day To Proactive Insight: Storio Group And Dynatrace

Feb 22, 2026

Alex Hibbitt, Engineering Director at Storio Group who led the observability transformation. He recounts consolidating multiple e-commerce platforms, the strain of 1.16 billion log lines a day, and how a culture-first approach plus AI-driven observability cut log costs and detection times. He also shares the Black Sunday wins where early detection prevented millions in impact.

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ANECDOTE

Merger Exposed Critical Observability Gaps

Storio Group merged five e-commerce platforms and struggled with fragmented tooling and observability gaps.
Alex Hibbitt described how those gaps risked peak-season revenue and customer trust on Black Sunday.

INSIGHT

Logs Alone Create Reactive Blindspots

Storio produced about 1.16 billion log lines per day and relied on engineers manually sifting logs.
That human-heavy approach made monitoring reactive, slow, and an organizational drag.

ADVICE

Use A Maturity Model And Deadlines

Build a tailored observability maturity model and engage engineers with relatable goals.
Use a concrete deadline like Black Friday to prioritize deliverables and create momentum.

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How do you protect millions in revenue during your busiest hour of the year when your entire business depends on digital performance?

At Perform 2026, I caught up with Alex Hibbitt, Engineering Director responsible for the customer platform at Storio Group, to unpack what happens when observability moves from an engineering afterthought to a board-level priority. Storio Group was formed from the merger of Photobox and Albelli, bringing together multiple brands and five separate e-commerce platforms into one unified customer journey. That consolidation created opportunity, but it also exposed risk, especially during peak trading from Black Friday through Black Sunday and into the Christmas rush.

Alex shared what it really looks like when downtime is non-negotiable. At peak, Storio's platform can generate up to 1.5 million euros per hour. A single poorly timed incident is not simply a technical problem, it is a direct threat to revenue and customer trust. Before partnering with Dynatrace, the team was relying heavily on centralized logging, processing over a billion log lines a day and depending on engineers to manually interpret signals. It was reactive, labor intensive, and left too much to chance.

What stood out for me was how cultural change led the transformation. Rather than imposing a new tool from the top down, Alex and his team built a maturity model engineers could relate to, created internal champions, and framed observability as risk management and business protection. The result was a reported 65 to 70 percent reduction in log costs, a 50 percent drop in mean time to detect overall, and up to 90 percent improvement for the most severe incidents.

We also explored how unifying logs, metrics, and traces into a single AI-driven platform helped Storio move from reactive firefighting to proactive detection. During one Black Sunday alone, three major issues were identified early enough to avoid an estimated 4.5 million euros in potential impact.

This conversation goes beyond tooling. It is about protecting customer experience, safeguarding revenue during peak demand, and building an engineering culture that embraces change. If your organization is wrestling with cloud costs, fragmented monitoring, or the pressure to deliver flawless digital performance under load, there are some powerful lessons here.