New Delhi, July 15 -- RedBus, one of India's largest online bus ticketing aggregators, has transformed bus travel bookings by leveraging digital technologies. Rithish Saralaya, senior vice president of Engineering at redBus, explains how the company adopted Elastic's application performance monitoring (APM) and observability solutions to enhance platform reliability and performance amidst increasing traffic and system complexity.
APM is a process of using software tools and telemetry data to monitor the performance of business-critical applications, ensuring they meet expected service levels and deliver a positive user experience
Founded in 2006, the Bengaluru-based company experienced a slowdown during and post the pandemic, prompting a streamlining of software tools. However, the company soon adopted an APM tool to improve platform reliability as business picked up.
Elastic partnered with redBus to provide end-to-end observability across its distributed systems. As redBus scaled, rising traffic and system complexity strained platform reliability and user experience. RedBus addressed these challenges by implementing Elastic's observability solutions, enhancing performance and accelerating issue resolution.
The increasing complexity of redBus's microservices-based architecture, spanning over 60 services, made it difficult to quickly detect and resolve system issues. While redBus previously used the ELK stack (referred to as the Elastic Stack), which is a suite of open-source tools primarily used for log management, analysis, and visualisation, log aggregation, it lacked the necessary contextual depth for full-service visibility.
Elastic Observability on Elastic Cloud, powered by Search AI, further enabled redBus to correlate logs, metrics, and traces within a single platform, allowing teams to identify degraded services, analyse root causes, and act with greater precision. This deployment quickly expanded due to its impact on system reliability and engineering efficiency.
Elastic's platform aligned with redBus's microservices infrastructure, providing the observability needed to uphold service quality. This real-time visibility into application and system performance helps detect issues before user impact, maintaining a low MTTR through rapid diagnosis and reduced downtime. Elastic's APM and centralised logging support the entire booking process, allowing engineering teams to quickly identify latency spikes and pinpoint failing services, improving MTTD and MTTR. This results in operational resilience, higher customer satisfaction, reduced drop-offs, and stronger conversion rates.
Elastic's solution architects collaborate with redBus to optimise system performance, providing unified, real-time insights into bookings, ratings, and payments. RedBus's engineering culture, combined with familiarity with Elastic's tools, accelerated implementation.
Rishikesh Radhakrishnan, Principal Solutions Architect at Elastic, said that Elastic's solution decodes complexity at scale, providing unified, real-time insight to surface critical information. Their teams were already familiar with Elastic's tools, which streamlined implementation and integrated observability into their engineering workflow.
With Elastic, redBus can troubleshoot with precision and focus on delivering seamless experiences. Radhakrishnan sees opportunities to deepen collaboration in AI, machine learning, and enhanced search. He suggests applying Elastic's AI and ML capabilities to operational data to enable proactive decision-making. He also envisions advancements in vector search and relevance tuning creating richer discovery experiences.
Radhakrishnan also advises organisations exploring observability to unify telemetry early and focus on tangible outcomes like lower downtime and faster resolution.
The company is further using AI and analytics to gain real-time insights from data, improving operations and customer experience. In an interview with TechCircle in March, Anoop Menon, chief technology officer of redBus, explained that integrating Gen AI into their customer chat interface has improved customer satisfaction from 65% to over 92% and optimised agent workload by providing seamless query responses around the clock.
The company also employs AI-driven monitoring, real-time intrusion detection systems, and BotManager for proactive threat detection and abuse prevention. End-to-end encryption secures sensitive data, and regular cybersecurity training equips employees to identify threats like phishing. A robust incident response plan, penetration testing, and security audits ensure swift mitigation.
Overall, improved customer experience is driving the company's business. In 2013, ibibo Group acquired redBus to expand its travel assets and strengthen its position in the Indian online travel market. Following Ibibo's acquisition by MakeMyTrip, redBus is now a MakeMyTrip company. Nonetheless, it continues to operate as a separate entity within the group. Today, redBus serves approximately 25 million customers across multiple countries with 1100 employees, selling 5.5 million tickets monthly, and boasting millions of app downloads and high user retention.
Published by HT Digital Content Services with permission from TechCircle.