How Burgan Bank Türkiye transformed observability and security with Elastic

Burgan Bank Türkiye Burgan Bank K.P.S.C., a subsidiary of Kuwait Projects Company (KIPCO) Group, is one of the largest holding groups and important banking groups in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region established in Kuwait in 1977.

The bank acts as a solution partner for its customers and provides services through its 26 branches located in 13 important industrial and trade regions of Turkey. The bank aims to establish long-term relations with its customers by emphasizing on stability and quality while conducting its activities in accordance with the principles of banking ethics, especially accuracy and reliability.

Darço Akkaranfil is the chief information office at Burgan Bank Türkiye. When considering the bank’s strategy for technology and innovation and how that improves the bank’s overall service, he says, “Improving the observability of our IT systems has been an important focus area for us. Elastic has supported this goal by helping us detect anomalies early through its machine learning and AI capabilities. This allows us to identify and address potential issues before they impact our customers, contributing to more stable and reliable services."

Machine learning is at the heart of the bank’s observability strategy. By analyzing application performance monitoring (APM) data, the team can detect anomalies based on the request path of transactions, http response code, and custom business logic, such as failed transaction rates and business errors.

Alerting is tightly integrated. While Zabbix, Grafana, and machine learning alerts feed into Elasticsearch, the main alert dashboard is powered by Alerta, which pulls data directly from Elastic. To protect sensitive information, Logstash uses Ruby filters to mask data like passwords at the API gateway level before it’s indexed, ensuring privacy and compliance.

The Burgan Bank team also uses Elastic’s anomaly explorer for both API gateway and APM jobs and maintains complex service maps to visualize their extensive microservices architecture. Automated reports on service errors and latency are distributed via emails, and a local SMS sender app delivers critical alerts through webhook.

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