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- Find Out Why Airwallex Chose VictoriaLogs!
VictoriaLogs provided Airwallex with the best balance of performance, simplicity, and cost.
- FinTech
- Singapore
VictoriaLogs provided a sustainable cost model for large-scale log ingestion. Compared with more customizable or warehouse-style architectures, it was much faster to operationalize and required less platform engineering overhead.
Main Benefits of Using VictoriaLogs
Cost-effectiveness
High ingestion efficiency
Strong query performance and reliability
Operational simplicity
Compatibility with the observability stack
Scalability
Challenge
Before adopting VictoriaLogs, Airwallex was facing a combination of cost, scale, and reliability challenges in its logging stack.
As Airwallex’s platform and engineering organization grew, log volume increased significantly across Kubernetes workloads, infrastructure components, and cloud-native services. Airwallex’s existing setup relied heavily on premium log platforms and cloud-native logging backends, which created rising ingestion costs and increasing pressure to control spend without sacrificing operational visibility.
In short, Airwallex needed a solution that could efficiently absorb large log volumes, scale with their business, materially reduce costs, and still provide a good developer/operator experience for troubleshooting and alerting.
At the same time, Airwallex needed to address several technical issues:
- Risk of throttling during peak ingestion periods on the primary logging platform
- A growing need to separate high-value operational/security logs from lower-value or high-volume logs
- Limited flexibility in managing logs from multiple environments and regions in a cost-efficient way
- The need for a simpler, more scalable logging backend for broad engineering self-service
- The need to preserve telemetry reliably while reducing dependence on expensive systems for all log categories
Solution
VictoriaLogs allowed Airwallex to position their logging platform more deliberately: premium systems for the highest-value, most time-sensitive logs, and VictoriaLogs for broader, large-scale retention and exploration use cases.
- High-volume log ingestion at lower cost: it gave Airwallex a practical way to offload large volumes of low-value, high-cardinality logs from premium platforms.
- Simple architecture and ease of adoption: compared with more operationally intensive alternatives, VictoriaLogs was much simpler to deploy and operate.
- Good query experience: the built-in query capabilities and Grafana integration made it easy for engineers to explore logs without introducing a completely new workflow.
- Compatibility with Airwallex’s observability stack: it fits well with their OpenTelemetry-based ingestion approach and broader observability architecture.
- Operational efficiency: the platform was simple enough that the Airwallex team could scale usage without creating a large operational burden.
Why VictoriaLogs Was Chosen Over Other Solutions
VictoriaLogs provided a fast path from evaluation to production use.
Strong ingestion and query performance for Airwallex’s target workloads
Lower operational complexity than more custom alternatives.
Native fit with Grafana and OpenTelemetry-based workflows.
- VictoriaLogs offered better economics for high-volume logs while preserving a practical day-to-day experience for engineering teams.
Technical Stats
Airwallex Logging Setup
Running the open source VictoriaLogs Cluster version
Platform
With a dedicated nodepool on Google Kubernetes Engine
Log retention
1 month
Ingestion Rate
sum(rate(vl_rows_ingested_total[24h]))
~1 Million/day
Disk Usage (Data)
sum(vl_data_size_bytes{type="storage"})~20TB for 1 Month retention
Disk Usage (Index)
sum(vl_data_size_bytes{type="indexdb"})~3.5TB for 1 Month retention
Log Search Rate
sum(rate(vl_http_requests_total{path=~".*/select/.*"}[24h]))~20
Memory Usage
process_resident_memory_bytes
145GB
CPU Usage
rate(process_cpu_seconds_total[24h])
150