Case study
How Bank of Georgia reduced MTTR and improved the stability of its digital banking platform with Dynatrace
BAKOTECH operates through a partner network
About the bank
Bank of Georgia is one of Georgia’s largest and most innovative banks, setting the standard for modern banking in the region since 1994. Today, the bank serves over 2.1 million active customers and employs approximately 8,000 people.
Over the years, Bank of Georgia has transformed from a traditional financial institution into a digital ecosystem where technology is not merely a supporting function, but the very foundation of the business. The bank operates on a “tech-company-first” principle: digital services, mobile banking, online lending, instant payments, and self-service solutions fully meet customer needs without requiring a physical branch visit.
Our core mission has always been to make financial services accessible to everyone, placing our clients’ individual goals at the center of our service model
Vazha Pirtskhalaishvili, Head of DevOps & DataOps Engineering, Bank of Georgia IT Department
For Bank of Georgia, the stability of its digital services is more than just a technical metric. It is a matter of trust, reputation, and the continuity of financial transactions for millions of customers every day.
This strategy was recognized when the bank received the World’s Best Digital Bank 2025 award from Global Finance Magazine for the second year in a row.
This success is driven by our in-house development of key IT systems, a customer-centric approach to digital products, an agile development culture, and continuous modernization of our technology stack.
Challenges and prerequisites for implementation
For Bank of Georgia, digital services are at the heart of its business. With most customer transactions taking place online, any delay in a transaction or instability in the mobile app instantly affects the user experience and trust.
That is precisely why, seven years ago, the bank made a strategic choice in favor of Dynatrace and has remained committed to that decision to this day. This underscores the platform’s value as a strategic foundation for operational stability. The starting point back then was a clear desire to shift from reactive “firefighting” to proactive management: to quickly identify the root causes of problems and prevent them before they could impact customers.
Before implementing Dynatrace, the bank faced several critical challenges:
Reactive monitoring without root cause analysis
Previous tools recorded the fact of an incident but did not explain its cause. Teams received alerts about outages, but identifying the root cause required manually correlating data from different systems. Each instance of this “detective work” took specialists hours instead of minutes.
In an environment where every second counts, such delays came at a very real cost: the loss of “precious minutes and seconds” in the banking sector is not an abstract technical risk but a direct reputational and financial burden. Every incident that goes unnoticed in time is a potential customer complaint, a failed transaction, or a loss of trust in the digital channel.Complex technological architecture
The bank’s IT landscape encompasses various programming languages, microservices architecture, cloud and on-premises components, and a Kubernetes environment. Fragmented tools did not provide a complete picture of the entire system’s operation — only isolated data sets, between which engineers had to manually establish connections. This not only slowed response times but also systematically overburdened teams with routine analytical work rather than resolving issues.
Lack of cross-functional collaboration
Incident investigation was handled sequentially across multiple teams — infrastructure, database, and development — each analyzing the problem within their own area of responsibility. Without a shared view of the environment, cross-team collaboration during critical incidents required extensive alignment effort, slowing down resolution and diverting specialists' time and focus away from core business priorities.
The absence of a unified observability platform meant there was no single source of truth — no common context from which all teams could assess the situation simultaneously and act in a coordinated, efficient manner.
A need that has developed
Bank of Georgia was looking for a platform that would provide full visibility into transactions, enable a shift from reactive response to proactive management, automatically identify the root cause of incidents, and unite teams around a shared operational context.
It was precisely this need that served as the starting point for choosing Dynatrace—a platform the bank has relied on for seven years.
Selecting and Implementing Dynatrace
After evaluating the market, Bank of Georgia selected Dynatrace as the unified platform for comprehensive observability across its complex digital environment. The choice was not arbitrary; it was based on specific technical and business criteria.
A unified platform for a varied stack
Bank of Georgia’s IT environment encompasses programming languages, microservices architecture, and both cloud-based and on-premises components. Most other tools covered only specific layers or required integrating multiple products. From day one, Dynatrace provided full coverage of the architecture, from infrastructure and Kubernetes to application code, without requiring complex custom integrations.
Dynatrace Intelligence (Davis® AI)
Traditional monitoring tools merely flag symptoms. Dynatrace, powered by its built-in Davis® AI engine, goes a step further: it automatically detects anomalies in real time, identifies the root cause of an incident, and assesses its business impact without the need for manual data correlation. It was precisely this ability to intelligently predict performance degradation that was the deciding factor: none of the solutions we considered offered a comparable level of automated analytics.
Distributed tracing and PurePath
In the banking environment, with its complex chains of dependencies, it is critical to understand what happens to every transaction at every level of the system. PurePath technology allows teams to track a single request from the front end through all microservices to the database, with code-level detail. This gave the bank’s teams a level of visibility unattainable with other platforms.
Smartscape® as a visual model of the system
A dynamic map of dependencies between services, containers, hosts, and processes has become a single source of truth for all teams, from development to infrastructure. Instead of each team seeing only its part of the system, everyone now has a unified, real-time context.
What were the results and their business impact?
For Bank of Georgia, the implementation of Dynatrace was not merely a technical upgrade but a shift in the operational model for managing digital services.
MTTD and MTTI: From detection to understanding in a matter of minutes
Before implementing Dynatrace, teams would only learn about latency incidents—often after they had already impacted customers. Identifying the root cause required manually correlating logs, metrics, and service dependencies, which dragged the process out indefinitely.
With Dynatrace, both metrics have seen significant improvement: Davis® AI detects anomalies in real time as soon as a problem emerges (MTTD), and automatic correlation into a single problem card allows you to instantly identify the root cause without additional manual analysis (MTTI).
The result is a clear shift from reactive response to proactive management: most issues are now detected and addressed before they ever impact users. The need for lengthy cross-team alignment sessions has been significantly reduced, enabling teams to act early and with confidence.Improving service reliability
Dynatrace Intelligence detects anomalies in service behavior in real time, before they become critical.
This means that performance degradation is detected early, bottlenecks are resolved before complaints arise, and most incidents are resolved before users even notice.
In digital banking, where even a single second of transaction delay can erode customer trust, this kind of proactivity directly impacts the business.The single source of truth for all IT teams
Smartscape® provides a comprehensive visualization of the dependencies between microservices, containers, hosts, and databases. When a problem arises, teams no longer waste time figuring out “whose responsibility it is.” Everyone sees the same view of the system and the exact location of the bottleneck.
Result: fewer internal escalations, faster decisions, and the development of a DevOps culture instead of a siloed model.Optimization of operating expenses
This aspect is particularly telling in terms of the uniqueness of the Bank of Georgia case. The transition to a SaaS model made it possible to fundamentally change the economic logic of monitoring.
Before the migration, the bank licensed its Kubernetes environment based on the memory capacity of worker nodes — a model that scales poorly as the number of microservices grows and does not reflect actual consumption. After migrating to SaaS, licensing is done at the level of individual microservices, providing much more precise cost control and flexibility when scaling the cloud environment.
At the same time, the bank was completely relieved of the administrative burden associated with maintaining its monitoring infrastructure. Updates, resource planning, and patching—all of these tasks were transferred to Dynatrace. The bank’s teams were able to focus exclusively on developing banking services rather than maintaining the monitoring platform. Additionally, the SaaS model guarantees constant access to the latest features without update delays, which is critical given the rapid evolution of the technology stack.
As a result, the bank gained a more flexible scaling model and better control over cloud costs.Stability as a factor in building trust and retaining customers
For Bank of Georgia, the stability of its digital services is a competitive advantage. Increasing uptime and reducing the number of critical incidents directly impact customer satisfaction, trust in the bank, and user retention across digital channels.
As a result, Dynatrace enabled the bank to reduce incident response times, minimize the number of “emergency” situations, bring teams together on a single platform, and ensure the stability of digital services for millions of users.
As a result, observability has evolved from a supporting function into an integral part of the bank’s digital transformation strategy.
Development Plans and Strategic Vision
Bank of Georgia views observability as an ongoing strategic initiative and an operational culture that evolves alongside the bank.
As technology stacks are modernized and organizations transition to cloud infrastructure, the role of Dynatrace continues to grow. The platform serves as a kind of safety net during the migration of legacy services, the scaling of microservices, and the rollout of new digital products.
The bank notes that its collaboration with Dynatrace goes beyond the traditional vendor-customer model. BAKOTECH—Dynatrace’s regional distributor—plays a key role in this partnership, providing architectural expertise, implementation support, and operational assistance. And the model of cooperation with a local partner with an in-depth understanding of the market’s specifics enables Bank of Georgia to confidently develop its observability strategy in a dynamic financial environment.
You shouldn’t look for a tool that simply alerts you that something has ‘gone down.’ You need a platform that explains why it happened and how it affects the user. In the banking sector, every minute counts
Vazha Pirtskhalaishvili, Head of DevOps & DataOps Engineering, Bank of Georgia IT Department
The bank's roadmap includes:
● expanding the coverage of infrastructure components to achieve 360° visibility; ● Implementation of Log Monitoring for centralized log analytics; ● Strengthening AI-driven correlations between metrics, traces, and logs; ● Further integration of observability into DevOps processes.
This will enable us to identify potential risks even more quickly and maintain high standards in digital banking.
Conclusion
For Bank of Georgia, Dynatrace has become the foundation of operational stability for its digital services.
The platform helped us transition from reactive responses to proactive management, unite teams around a single source of truth, and scale digital innovations without sacrificing productivity.
In an environment where technology is at the heart of business, observability is no longer just a technical tool, but a strategic factor in competitiveness.