Record Uptime Unlocked: How This Retailer Mastered Peak Season with GenAI

Picture this: It’s the busiest shopping day of the year. Your e-commerce platform is processing thousands of transactions per minute. Suddenly, multiple alerts start firing across different services. In the past, this would have meant hours of troubleshooting, stressed-out SRE teams, and potential revenue impact. But for one national grocery retailer, this scenario transformed from a nightmare into just another smoothly handled operation—all thanks to their newest team member: a GenAI-powered ITOps engineer.

The Breaking Point: When Traditional Tools Aren’t Enough

Every IT operations leader knows the feeling: despite investing in state-of-the-art monitoring tools, your team still struggles to keep pace with the sheer volume of telemetry data flowing through your digital infrastructure. This was exactly where our retailer found themselves. Their e-commerce platform was successfully processing hundreds of thousands of daily transactions, but this success came with mounting operational challenges:

• ITOps engineers were drowning in data, spending countless hours manually correlating information across multiple tools to investigate incidents
• Growing infrastructure complexity made maintaining rapid response times increasingly difficult
• Their lean SRE team was overwhelmed managing concurrent incidents, particularly during peak shopping periods

While their existing tools were generating valuable data, the team simply couldn’t analyze it fast enough to prevent service impacts. They needed a solution to scale their team’s capabilities without adding headcount.

The GenAI Teammate That Changed Everything

The implementation of Hawkeye by NeuBird marked a fundamental shift in their operations. As a GenAI-powered teammate, Hawkeye seamlessly integrated with their existing AWS CloudWatch, AWS MSK, and PagerDuty setup, immediately beginning to analyze their infrastructure telemetry in real-time.

The impact was immediate and dramatic:

• ~90% Reduction in MTTR: Hawkeye’s ability to instantly correlate data across platforms and provide clear, actionable insights dramatically reduced investigation time from hours to minutes
• 24/7 Expert Analysis: The platform provided continuous monitoring and expert-level analysis across their entire tech stack, eliminating the need for after-hours escalations
• Automated Incident Resolution: For known issues, Hawkeye could implement pre-approved solutions automatically, often resolving problems before they impacted customers
• Enhanced Team Productivity: SREs were freed from routine investigations to focus on strategic improvements

The Ultimate Test: Holiday Shopping Surge

The true test of any IT operations solution comes during peak periods, and for this retailer, that meant the holiday shopping season. Here’s how Hawkeye transformed their peak time readiness:

Proactive Capacity Planning

Weeks before the expected surge, Hawkeye analyzed historical patterns and current growth trajectories, providing specific scaling recommendations for AWS services and Kafka clusters. This proactive approach meant the team could implement changes methodically, rather than scrambling last-minute.

Real-time Incident Prevention

During peak shopping hours, Hawkeye detected early warning signs of payment processing bottlenecks and automatically implemented scaling adjustments. This proactive response prevented what could have been significant service disruptions.

Parallel Incident Management

When multiple alerts triggered simultaneously across services, Hawkeye handled them concurrently, providing clear resolution steps for each. This capability proved invaluable during high-traffic periods when multiple issues could surface simultaneously.

The result? The retailer achieved their highest-ever uptime during their busiest season, maintaining exceptional service levels even as transaction volumes hit new records.

Beyond Tools: Transforming IT Operations with AI Expertise

What makes Hawkeye different from traditional monitoring tools? It’s not just about alerting or data collection—it’s about bringing instant expertise and actionable intelligence to every incident. For this retailer, the transformation included:

• Automated analysis of routine incidents with root cause analysis (RCA) generated in just a couple of minutes
• Enhanced incident management scaling through seamless PagerDuty integration
• Consistently reliable service during peak demand periods
• More time for engineers to focus on strategic initiatives—no more SRE burnout from hours of troubleshooting

Entering the Future of IT Operations

For the grocery retailer, Hawkeye has proven to be more than just another tool – it’s a trusted teammate that brings instant expertise to every incident, enabling the team to maintain reliability while scaling operations efficiently. As digital operations continue to grow in complexity, the ability to leverage AI for intelligent, automated incident response isn’t just a luxury—it’s a necessity for maintaining competitive advantage.

Ready to transform your IT operations? Learn more about how Hawkeye can help your team master complex infrastructure challenges and deliver consistent service reliability, no matter the scale.

Want to learn more about how Hawkeye can transform your IT operations? Book a demo today.