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Overview
📖 AWS re:Invent 2025 - Paciolan’s Journey: Digital Transformation & Operational Excellence with AWS
In this video, Pete DiStefano from SolarWinds and Ryan Lauer from Paciolan discuss Paciolan's cloud migration journey and observability strategy. Paciolan, a live event ticketing provider focused on college athletics, operates a hybrid environment with Kubernetes clusters in EKS and on-premises, plus AWS architecture. Ryan explains how SolarWinds APM helped them gain visibility into microservices interactions during containerization, enabling better tuning and realistic resource limits. The company monitors critical traffic spikes during ticket on-sales and stadium entry scanning, using customized SolarWinds dashboards for SREs, development, and customer service teams. Ryan shares how real-time monitoring allows proactive issue detection before clients report problems, and how AWS enables quick scaling compared to on-premises hardware planning. Pete emphasizes SolarWinds' operational resilience approach through their full stack observability platform, covering networks, infrastructure, applications, user experience, databases, and security, integrated with incident response and service management.
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Main Part
Industry Challenges and Paciolan's Cloud Migration Journey
Thank you. My name is Pete DiStefano. I'm with SolarWinds. I'm here with Ryan Lauer from Paciolan. We are going to spend some time today taking you down their cloud journey. So let me quickly take you through the agenda.
We've got industry challenges, Paciolan overview, the cloud journey of Paciolan, and SolarWinds Observability. Okay, I just wanted to make sure we got a few words in there about AI because I know we want to kind of get the jump on all the people here, since nobody out here has talked about AI yet. So I thought we'd come out there and start with that. Seriously, we will probably talk a little bit about AI later on, but we are going to take you through Ryan and his company's journey. But before I do that,
I want to talk a little bit about industry challenges that we're all facing. Now, I'm not going to read this list, whether it's troubleshooting or root cause analysis or visibility gaps. If I had to boil down the challenges that you're all facing today, one of them is time. Time when things are not going right, time when things are down. And really, what does that boil down to? It's the challenge of delivering on services in today's very complex environment. So I'm not sure what your environment looks like.
You might be pure cloud, you might be pure on-premises, you might be in some hybrid world. I believe most of us are in some type of hybrid environment. Well, you're going to hear a lot more about SolarWinds and this concept of operational resilience. Resilience, for those of you who are working in the industry, means when something goes wrong, how quickly, how resilient can I be? How quickly can I get up and running? Well, operational resilience is the concept of knowing something is going to go wrong. I might have a bad change that causes an issue. I might have a bug in some software or a system that goes down. How can I plan for the fact that things are going to happen? How do I plan so that when there is an issue, I can continue to deliver a level of service without any impact to my business? That's what our entire company, our portfolio, is about—helping you become operationally resilient.
Now, our goal is to help you and your people be operationally resilient, and that's with the workflows, the processes, and of course, the technologies that you're using to support and observe your IT environment. Now, instead of me talking about that, what I'd like to do is have Ryan talk about why time is of the essence within his company and how important, how critical it is to deliver on service for the success of his company. So Ryan, why don't you take us through who Paciolan is?
So here at Paciolan, what we do is live event ticketing, and most of our clients are in the college athletics arena. So what we do is provide people the ability to buy the tickets and scan them at the stadium when they come in. There are different times that we have traffic spikes, and that's basically centered around the time that we do on-sales for our clients and when we have people coming into the stadiums and scanning and coming into the stadium.
All right, so especially this time of year, I'm so thankful that Paciolan was willing to spend time with us, because this is really the bread and butter part of their year, and they're spending time with us. So thank you for that. Let's go through a little bit of this journey that Paciolan has gone through. Let's start with just talking
about, tell us about your IT environment. I know you're hybrid, right? Correct. We have a couple of Kubernetes clusters, some in EKS, some on-premises, and we have different AWS architecture that also works with some of our other on-premises architecture. Okay, so I talked about challenges just a moment ago. I talked about things like root cause, getting to the root cause quickly, or do I understand, do I have visibility to everything? What are some of the historical challenges Paciolan has had?
So when we started to containerize and move all of our on-premises services to a microservices architecture in either EKS or on-premises Kubernetes, some of the challenges we found were we weren't sure how some services would interact with other services and how they would act being containerized instead of being, say, in a Beanstalk or an EC2. And what we did is we installed the SolarWinds APM, which helped us get an insight into how our services were interacting with other services.
This included insights into any network latencies or similar issues. SolarWinds would show us these details in their dashboards, and that way we could better tune our services. We could set more realistic limits and requests based on what we saw in our traffic.
Real-Time Observability and SolarWinds' Full Stack Platform for Operational Resilience
All right, so you've been using SolarWinds for a while, and there's a variety of different tools, but what was the new approach you guys decided to use and why? The APM was relatively new. We wanted to see how everything would interact with each other as we were doing our migrations. When we do those big on-sales or we have those big football Saturdays where people are coming into the stadium and scanning their tickets, we wanted to be able to have insight into how all of those services were acting as well as our infrastructure. That way we could see CPU, memory, disk writes, and network with our infrastructure as well as the APM, and then also show all of our AWS infrastructure behind that single pane of glass that SolarWinds gives us.
We can sit behind and look at these dashboards and say we have a dashboard for SREs, we have a dashboard for development, for customer service. Everybody watches their own dashboards to be able to tell how their services are reacting and what kind of impact they're seeing in their different areas. Yeah, would you mind telling the folks what you had to do this morning?
So yeah, this morning there were a couple of big on-sales. I know bowl selections are coming, so as I was watching the AWS keynote, I was monitoring our on-sales. Our sister company SideArm also has early signing day today, which is a big day in college athletics. A lot of people are coming to the sites just to see who their colleges are picking from the high school students. What we like to see is how everything's operating, and the SolarWinds dashboards give us that, as well as setting up alerts for some of those key services and bottlenecks that we've seen in the past. We set up alerts so that if we see something going wrong, we're notified well before our clients are calling us saying, hey, our systems are down.
All right, thanks. So you've been an AWS customer eight or nine years? Yeah, it's been about eight years, I believe. So what have been the benefits of now leveraging AWS, because you guys migrated from on-premises into the cloud? Why AWS? AWS gives us the ability to scale quickly. If we're noticing that our nodes are high on memory or CPU from one of our dashboards, we can go ahead and scale up. If we notice our services, or maybe a service is getting bottlenecked, the request time isn't where we want it to be, we can always scale those services up. AWS and EKS allow us to do that, whereas on-premises it requires more planning to add hardware into our clusters.
All right, so monitoring. You monitor a network, you monitor a database, you monitor an application. Why observability? Just so that we can get a jump on any issues we see and we can better plan for the upcoming on-sales, for the upcoming football seasons. We know where our services are at. Even though we do a lot of our changes in the off time during the summer, come full load, and even though we do load testing, sometimes it just doesn't react the same way as live traffic. What we like to do is those first couple of weeks, we're all on a call, we're watching our dashboards and making sure we're all talking to each other, making sure that everything is working the way we want it to.
If we start to see issues, we can make adjustments right then and there, and SolarWinds gives us the ability to do that with the real-time metrics for either our APMs or Kubernetes clusters, EC2s, databases, stuff like that. All right, well, thanks. So first of all, I didn't mention AI once through his whole presentation, but don't get me wrong, I will get that in here in the next couple of minutes before we're done. And by the way, if you do have any questions, I've just got a couple more slides. We'd like to open it up if you have any questions for Ryan or for myself.
I do want to talk a little bit about SolarWinds and our overall platform across the board. On the left, you'll see our observability offerings. I say monitoring and observability because monitoring is a key element. It's a foundational element of observability. But if you truly want to understand the state of your system, you need to look at all the elements together. As Ryan said, when you have multiple teams, being able to look and have the same single source of truth, and to be able to look at the impact that a database or an application or infrastructure is having on the overall system and looking at it together on a platform, that's why we've built out a full stack observability platform.
With SolarWinds, you can do that from SaaS or you can do it from on-premises. It's your call. Full stack, wherever your stack is running, you can run it as SaaS or on-premises. We've included incident response to really connect the dots between all of the things that are happening in real-time and communicating to the people that need to solve that problem. And then to complete the lifecycle, all integrated into our service management offering.
So whether it's your help desk, your problem management, your change management, your incident response, and your monitoring observability, at SolarWinds we believe these three things together can help your people, your processes and workflows, and help you with your technologies to be operationally resilient. Now, just to give you an idea, when I talk about full stack, when I talk about observability offerings, we're talking about your networks, your infrastructure, your applications, your user experience. To not understand the user's perspective of availability and performance, you're not looking at the whole picture.
It doesn't matter how many green lights you have in your network operating center. What matters is the user's perspective of performance. So being able to look at all that stuff collectively is really important, as well as your databases and security, and by the way, all built on a common platform. That delivers dashboards and alerting, intelligent alerting systems, and yes, machine learning engine, generative AI, and newly announced agentic AI.
We'd love you to come by our booth, 1380. Let our team show you some of the stuff that Ryan and Paciolan is doing, and some of the other things that SolarWinds can bring to the table, so you can understand how your company could be operationally resilient. Any questions for Ryan or myself? Thank you for taking the time.
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