Austin · Lisbon · KarachiTrust centredev@binarybreach.tech
BinaryBreach
Case study — Payments processor · United Kingdom

Correlated tracing and automated reconciliation across a payment estate, cutting mean time to restore from hours to minutes.

SectorFinancial services & fintechDuration5 monthsStackOpenTelemetry · Grafana
Financial district towers seen from below
<20 minMedian time to restore
−74%Pages per on-call week
ContinuousReconciliation
End to endTransaction tracing
The challenge

Where it started

A failed payment could involve seven internal services and three external providers, and nobody could follow a single transaction end to end. Incidents were diagnosed by reading logs in parallel across teams, and daily reconciliation breaks were investigated manually days after the fact.

The approach

  1. 01

    Introduced a propagated correlation identifier across every service and provider boundary, including the ones that required a proxy to inject it.

  2. 02

    Built a reconciliation engine that matches ledger, provider and internal event streams continuously rather than nightly.

  3. 03

    Defined SLOs per payment corridor, with alerts tied to user-visible symptoms instead of resource metrics.

  4. 04

    Ran game days against injected provider failures until the runbooks matched reality.

Stack
  • OpenTelemetry
  • Grafana
  • Kafka
  • Kubernetes
  • Terraform
The outcome

Where it landed

Any transaction can now be followed end to end in a single view. Median time to restore fell from just over three hours to under twenty minutes, and reconciliation breaks surface within minutes rather than at the next day's close.

Capabilities used

More work

A short conversation with an engineer, not a sales qualification call. If we're the wrong people for it, we'll say so and point you somewhere better.