# How Banorte modernized observability to support growth at scale with OpenObserve > Learn how Banorte is evolving observability to manage growing telemetry volumes, expand distributed tracing, and keep data within its own infrastructure. Source: https://openobserve.ai/customer-stories/banorte-customer-story/ Published: 2026-10-20 --- ## About Banorte Banorte (Banco Mercantil del Norte) is the second largest financial group in Mexico, serving millions of customers across banking, insurance, and pension businesses. With tens of thousands of employees, a nationwide branch network, and roughly 12,000 ATMs, the bank operates mission-critical IT infrastructure at a scale few organizations in Latin America match. Banorte operates its technology environment within its own data centers, backed by years of operational experience and a highly skilled engineering team. In banking, observability is a business-critical capability: every minute of service disruption or slow incident diagnosis can directly affect the customer experience. ## The Challenge: Scaling Observability for a Growing Digital Ecosystem As Banorte continued expanding its digital footprint, observability became an increasingly strategic capability. With growing data volumes, increasingly distributed applications, and a technology environment supporting millions of customer interactions, the bank sought an observability approach that could scale efficiently while providing deeper operational visibility. 1. **Efficiently supporting growth at scale.** As log volumes continued to increase, the bank required a solution that could optimize infrastructure utilization and support long-term growth in a cost-efficient manner, while maintaining the performance and reliability expected in a mission-critical environment. 2. **Expanding visibility across distributed services.** As applications and services became more interconnected, engineering teams identified an opportunity to enhance end-to-end visibility across systems. Distributed tracing emerged as a key capability to accelerate troubleshooting, improve operational insights, and better understand application performance. At the same time, the bank's observability ecosystem included specialized solutions for metrics, alerting, and dashboards, creating an opportunity to further streamline operations and strengthen visibility across the technology landscape. ## Why OpenObserve A trusted partner introduced Banorte to OpenObserve. Its combination of storage optimization and compute efficiency aligned closely with the bank's observability requirements. - **Optimized storage efficiency.** OpenObserve leverages compressed columnar storage and object storage architectures to maximize storage utilization. This enables Banorte to manage large-scale telemetry data efficiently while supporting long-term growth. - **Efficient infrastructure utilization.** By requiring fewer compute resources for the same logging workloads, OpenObserve enables Banorte to scale observability capabilities more efficiently and support future growth without proportional increases in infrastructure requirements. Beyond efficiency gains, OpenObserve aligns with Banorte's infrastructure and governance strategy. Operating entirely within the bank's environment, it provides the control, security, and data sovereignty required by a leading financial institution. > "As our digital ecosystem continues to evolve, we need technology capabilities that can scale with our operations while allowing us to use infrastructure more efficiently and maintain full control of our data. The evolution of our observability strategy gives us greater visibility across an increasingly interconnected environment and creates a scalable foundation to support Banorte's continued digital growth." > > **Victor Guillen, IT Director, Banorte** > "OpenObserve has enabled us to evolve from primarily managing logs to a more comprehensive observability approach that incorporates distributed tracing at enterprise scale. This gives our teams greater visibility across applications and services, accelerates operational analysis, and allows us to efficiently manage growing telemetry volumes while keeping the data within Banorte's own infrastructure." > > **Isaias Santiago Santacruz, Deputy Director of Managed Services, Banorte** ## The Results: Scaling Observability Across the Enterprise Banorte initially adopted OpenObserve to strengthen its observability capabilities and support the growing demands of its technology environment. As adoption expanded, distributed tracing became a core component of the bank's observability strategy. The platform's efficient storage architecture enables the bank to support large-scale telemetry retention while optimizing infrastructure utilization and maintaining operational efficiency. The growing adoption of distributed tracing has provided engineering teams with deeper visibility across applications and services, strengthening their ability to monitor increasingly interconnected systems and accelerating operational insights. OpenObserve also integrates seamlessly within Banorte's broader observability ecosystem, complementing existing monitoring, alerting, and visualization capabilities. This approach has enabled the bank to expand its observability strategy while building on existing investments and operational processes, supporting a gradual and scalable transformation aligned with the needs of a large financial institution. > "Greater visibility across applications and services allows us to manage growing telemetry volumes more efficiently at enterprise scale." > > **Alejandro Contreras Liceaga, OpenObserve Observability Administrator, Banorte** ## Observability on Banorte's Terms What began as an initiative to strengthen observability has evolved into a platform that supports large-scale telemetry, distributed tracing, and long-term data retention, all within Banorte's own infrastructure. The result is greater visibility, operational efficiency, and control delivered in a way that aligns with the bank's technology and governance strategy. Ready to see what 140x storage efficiency looks like on your own infrastructure? 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