Ankit Anand

Maintainer, SigNoz

About Linkcy

LinkcyLinkcy is a fast-growing fintech startup providing a multi-tenant API for financial transactions. The company enables its clients to create accounts, manage transactions, and issue cards, offering a full suite of banking services through an API-driven model.

With a compact but efficient tech team of five engineers, Linkcy prioritizes reliability, security, and performance in its financial API. Observability is a crucial aspect of ensuring seamless operations and maintaining a high level of service availability for its clients.

The Challenge - Needed a Comprehensive Observability Solution

Despite using multiple tools across different teams—Sentry for error tracking and Grafana for infrastructure monitoring—Linkcy lacked a unified observability platform. During their research, they came across SigNoz.

Linkcy needed a comprehensive observability solution to:

• Monitor API performance and customer usage trends.
• Gain visibility into transactions and track errors effectively.
• Avoid vendor lock-in and maintain flexibility through open-source tools.

Why SigNoz?

Before choosing SigNoz, Linkcy explored several options, including a potential Grafana Cloud stack with ElasticSearch. However, after benchmarking different solutions, SigNoz stood out due to:

• Native support for OpenTelemetry – ensuring easy integration and future flexibility.
• Open-source nature – allowing full control over data and avoiding vendor lock-in.
• Comprehensive APM, logging, and infrastructure monitoring – eliminating the need for multiple tools.

Implementation & Key Use Cases

API Observability with Traces and Logs

Linkcy leverages SigNoz to monitor its API traffic and user interactions. The team primarily uses traces and logs to:

• Track financial transactions and API calls in real time.
• Monitor the success rate of operations such as money transfers.
• Identify API errors (e.g., HTTP 500 responses) and debug issues quickly.

"We now have a better understanding of how each client is using our API technically."

• Alexandre Moray, Senior Software Engineer

Real-Time Dashboards for Multi-Tenant API Monitoring

Linkcy uses SigNoz dashboards to monitor the performance and usage of its critical APIs. The dashboards provide real-time visibility into API traffic, transaction volumes, and failure rates. By filtering data per client or operation, the team can quickly detect anomalies, troubleshoot issues, and optimize API efficiency.

"Our product owner, despite not having a technical background, was able to create dashboards to track webhook activity with our provider."

• Alexandre Moray, Senior Software Engineer

These insights help both technical and non-technical stakeholders, including product managers, to understand API behavior and make data-driven decisions. The dashboards also assist in identifying API load patterns, ensuring smooth performance during peak usage hours.

4Alerting & Troubleshooting

"We set up alerts when our API exceeded rate limits with an external provider, allowing us to take action before customers were affected."

• Alexandre Moray, Senior Software Engineer

While Linkcy primarily uses dashboards for monitoring, they have started setting up alerts for critical errors, such as excessive 429 (Too Many Requests) responses from their provider.

5. Monitoring Temporal Workflows with OpenTelemetry

"Now, we can see a full trace of financial transactions, linking API calls with Temporal workflows, which was previously missing in our setup."

• Alexandre Moray, Senior Software Engineer

Linkcy also integrates Temporal, a workflow orchestration tool, with OpenTelemetry traces in SigNoz. This setup provides an end-to-end view of transactions, from API requests to the execution of workflows inside Temporal.

Results & Impact

With SigNoz, Linkcy has achieved: ✅ End-to-end visibility across API, infrastructure, and workflows. ✅ Faster debugging of customer issues and API errors. ✅ Improved decision-making by enabling both engineers and product teams to analyze system behavior. ✅ Flexible deployment options – ensuring future compliance needs can be met without tool migration.

Future Plans

"The experience with SigNoz has been great. The open-source nature and OpenTelemetry support make it a perfect fit for our growing fintech infrastructure."

• Alexandre Moray, Senior Software Engineer

As Linkcy continues to scale, its future roadmap focuses on enhancing observability across its expanding infrastructure. The team plans to implement more advanced alerting mechanisms to automate anomaly detection and proactive issue resolution. They are also exploring SigNoz’s new Infrastructure Monitoring module to replace existing Grafana-based monitoring, ensuring deeper insights into Kubernetes performance.

Additionally, Linkcy aims to optimize its OpenTelemetry implementation further, reducing manual instrumentation efforts and streamlining observability across services. With an increasing number of clients onboard, the company is committed to continuously refining its monitoring strategy to maintain high availability, optimize costs, and ensure seamless operations for financial transactions.

Final Thoughts

For fintech startups like Linkcy, where security, compliance, and operational visibility are crucial, SigNoz offers a powerful observability stack with the flexibility of open-source and the robustness of a commercial-grade solution.

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