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Avis Budget Group’s observability story, as publicly documented, is a cloud-native modernization effort that brought open-source monitoring tools together with OpsCruise’s SmartLayer. The Linux Foundation’s 2022 webinar listing names Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, and Lens, and describes using the platform to diagnose application problems. A customer statement published by OpsCruise says deployment built on Avis’s existing open-source monitoring stack and required no changes to running services. The public material does not disclose the incidents, architecture details, or measured results.
What Avis’s observability project set out to address
The Linux Foundation’s event listing places the work in Avis Budget Group’s transition to a modern cloud-native architecture. Its focus was the challenge of seeing and troubleshooting applications built from interconnected services while using open-source infrastructure. The recording date listed for the webinar is April 26, 2022.
The listing identifies Matt Surabian, then Avis Budget Group (ZipCar)’s Director of DevOps Engineering, as the Avis speaker, alongside OpsCruise solutions architect Cesar Quintana. It describes a discussion of the business drivers for modernization, Avis’s cloud-native transition, its experience with CNCF observability tools, and the OpsCruise partnership. The Linux Foundation webinar listing is an event description, not a transcript or a detailed deployment report.
Which open-source tools were named
The webinar description names Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, and Lens as examples of CNCF observability project tools in Avis’s experience. This identifies tools highlighted in the presentation; it does not establish that each was deployed in production, how they were configured, or which versions Avis used.
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- Prometheus: named among the open-source tools associated with the observability story.
- Grafana: also named as an example project.
- Loki: included in the event description’s list.
- Lens: included in that list as well.
The listing frames the approach around visibility across telemetry such as metrics, logs, traces, and flows. It does not give a tool-by-tool mapping of which system supplied each signal for Avis.
What OpsCruise SmartLayer added
The event description presents OpsCruise SmartLayer as a commercial layer for unifying open-source observability tools. It says the presentation would show examples of Avis application problems diagnosed and solved through the platform, powered by CNCF projects. The public listing does not identify those incidents or explain their root causes, diagnostic steps, or resolution times.
OpsCruise’s later product description provides context for the kind of functionality the company associated with its platform: bringing together monitoring and telemetry technologies such as Kubernetes, eBPF, Prometheus, Loki, Jaeger, and Istio, with capabilities including dependency discovery, contextual troubleshooting, and telemetry/configuration unification. These are vendor capability claims and a broader supported-tool list—not confirmation that Avis used every listed technology or feature. OpsCruise’s announcement also contains historical 2021 plan details that should not be treated as current pricing or availability.
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Outbyte Driver Updater FREEScan for outdated or missing drivers - takes under a minuteDriver Scan →Outbyte PC Repair FREERepair Windows errors before they cause bigger problemsFix Now →A customer story from Cambridge Intelligence, which identifies Avis Budget Group among OpsCruise customers, illustrates the platform’s graph-oriented product context. It describes viewing application dependencies and filtering or grouping elements such as namespaces, nodes, pods, containers, and labels, then navigating to dashboards with configuration, telemetry, and performance details. That account does not establish which of those capabilities were part of Avis’s 2022 deployment. Read the Cambridge Intelligence customer story.
What Avis said about implementation
In OpsCruise’s 2022 Monitoring Manifesto, Matt Surabian described the challenge of seeing how microservices fit into the broader stack and said OpsCruise built on Avis’s existing open-source monitoring stack. He said deployment was simple and required no changes to running services. This is a customer statement reproduced in vendor-published material, rather than an independently documented implementation account.
“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.”
— Matt Surabian, Director, DevOps Engineering, Avis Budget Group (ZipCar), as quoted in the OpsCruise Monitoring Manifesto (2022)
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The statement supports a claim about avoiding changes to running services in this deployment, but it does not specify how the platform was installed, how long rollout took, what integrations were needed, or who maintained it afterward.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.What the public account does—and does not—establish
The webinar listing confirms the presentation’s subject, named tools, partnership framing, and intended application-problem demonstrations. The vendor manifesto adds Surabian’s statement about fit with Avis’s existing stack. Neither source provides a case-level account of specific incidents, quantified reliability or productivity gains, operating costs, or a deployment inventory.
The Monitoring Manifesto also cites vendor-wide outcomes—up to a 50% improvement in SRE-to-Dev ratios and up to 20% fewer Kubernetes resources without impacting performance or risk. OpsCruise does not identify those figures as results measured at Avis, and the cited passage does not provide enough methodology to treat them as independently validated. They should not be attributed to Avis’s project.
For teams evaluating a similar approach, this account points to practical questions rather than a complete blueprint:
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- Can a platform use the telemetry and open standards already present, or will it require new instrumentation or changes to services?
- Does it connect infrastructure and application dependencies to metrics, logs, and traces in one troubleshooting workflow?
- Can engineers navigate from a service or dependency view to the relevant telemetry and configuration?
- What work remains for the team to operate and maintain the underlying open-source stack, and what are the platform’s costs?
The sources describe the first three as themes or product context, but do not answer them in enough detail to assess Avis’s actual implementation or its economics.
Keep Avis’s other modernization work separate
Avis Budget Group has a broader cloud-modernization context, but a distinct TCS account about its Rate Shop system concerns a separate initiative: moving a legacy mainframe application to AWS, migrating more than 250 DB2 and IMS databases to Couchbase on EC2, and using Kafka and AWS services. That account does not connect those technologies or migration details to the OpsCruise observability webinar. TCS’s Rate Shop modernization account should therefore be read as a separate project, not as part of the SmartLayer deployment.
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