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Chooses Cortex XCOR to Scale Observability Across 300,000 Professionals

SUMMARY

Compass Inc. empowers a network of over 300,000 real estate professionals across some of the most recognized and iconic brands, like @properties and Sotheby’s International Realty. Despite the company’s success in standardizing observability practices, it continued to face ongoing financial strain with its previous observability vendor.

To confront this challenge and gain control over total cost of ownership (TCO), Compass switched to Cortex^® XCOR^™, with outstanding results. The company reduced MTTR by 25%, streamlined developer workflows and can now support organizational growth without increasing observability spend.

RESULTS

$10M+

in projected TCO savings over six years, as transaction volume grows.

25%

improvement in MTTR since adopting XCOR automated workflows.

8K to 50

monitor consolidation using automated catch-all monitors.

CHALLENGE

Operational, financial and technical friction

Over the past several years, Compass transformed its engineering operations by moving from reactive monitoring to a standardized observability practice. To deliver a better customer experience, Compass kick-started an early initiative to boost platform reliability across all teams. This initiative helped build and scale a top-notch observability function as the engineering organization increased to over 500 members.

Despite this success, issues remained with the previous observability vendor, causing a severe financial strain—driving annual budget overruns of over 30% and forcing teams to restrict data ingestion. These challenges with the legacy vendor included:

Unpredictable costs: Host-based pricing triggered 30%+ annual budget overruns.
Visibility gaps: Poor platform availability led to an average of two Sev-1 incidents monthly.
Operational bottlenecks: that consumed engineering resources. These roadblocks required over an entire quarter of technical capacity to establish guardrails on excessive and ungoverned publishing of metrics and logs.
Asset clutter: 12,000 custom monitors and 4,000 dashboards created severe diagnostic noise.

“The impact of Cortex XCOR is to really be in control of your destiny—cost optimization on one side, and having the ability to detect, diagnose and resolve incidents before your customers do on the other.“

— Dan McClure

Principal Engineer, Compass Inc.

SOLUTIONS

Modernized observability with complete control

By working with the Palo Alto Networks team, Compass replaced its legacy observability vendor with to help the company regain control over its operational, financial and technical challenges.

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Enterprise observability modernization with Cortex XCOR

The move to Cortex XCOR enabled Compass to regain financial control and stabilize platform performance. While the previous vendor allowed cost optimization on a fraction of published telemetry, Cortex XCOR enabled optimization across all metrics, logs and traces. This transition eliminated unexpected volume spikes and unpredictable overages—all while maintaining the complete visibility required for real-time monitoring and rapid troubleshooting.
Automated governance with lens and catch-all monitors

Compass automated its observability workflow by using the Cortex Services view and Terraform provider, eliminating manual asset creation and configuration drift. It can now dynamically detect new microservices from metric labels and automatically generate standardized dashboards and dependency charts, removing the need for engineers to build dashboards manually.

The company also replaced 8,000 cluttered legacy monitors with just 50 automated catch-all monitors. By applying custom threshold overrides through the Terraform provider, teams maintain tailored, high-precision alerting without the traditional operational overhead.
Streamlined developer experience and thorough investigation

Compass has transformed its day-to-day workflows by using the Cortex XCOR Services view. Before, the developer experience was largely feature-oriented, moving from one distinct telemetry view to another. The Services view, however, aggregates all data related to a specific service on a single pane. Developers see only their team’s specific assets, eliminating global clutter while system administrators maintain global operational oversight.

Query language adoption is a common hurdle in moving to a platform that uses open standards throughout. To simplify Prometheus Query Language (PromQL) adoption, Compass developers have begun using Natural Language Query Builder in Cortex XCOR. This feature enables them to query their metrics using plain English versus learning another syntax.

“On Cortex XCOR, the results have been incredible for us. We went seven months with zero Sev-1 incidents postmigration, down from two a month previously.“

— Dan McClure

Principal Engineer, Compass Inc.

Strategic growth and scaling through AI-driven observability

Following its migration to Cortex XCOR, Compass continues to see significant organizational growth. The cost optimization capabilities in Cortex XCOR help Compass maintain predictable TCO as the company scales.

Compass continues to develop AI-driven workflows to automate brokerage operations with Cortex XCOR providing the core strategic foundation and continuous innovation required to support high-velocity enterprise scaling.