Volvo Connect increased database efficiency tracking 65 million daily events with MongoDB Atlas on AWS

INTRODUCTION

A new vision for fleet management

Volvo Group Connected Solutions is responsible for Volvo Connect, an interactive portal that enables drivers and fleet managers to track trucks, activities, and even insights – all in one digital interface. Volvo Connect saves time, eliminates hassle, and gives customers better visibility, helping them to prepare, plan and continuously improve.

Volvo Connect manages 65 million events every day, a number expected to reach two billion within two years. The company needed a scalable, flexible, and stress-free database platform to support these transactions and chose MongoDB Atlas on AWS for ease of use and functionality. Atlas provides a near zero maintenance solution that makes it easy to scale the database on demand.

THE CHALLENGE

Driving new ways of networking

Headquartered in Gothenburg, Sweden, Volvo Group produces and sells trucks, buses and construction equipment as well as marine and industrial drive systems. It employs over 95,000 people and has 1,500 dealerships in 85 countries. Volvo Group Connected Solutions leads the development of the group’s connected services and solutions to deliver competitive offerings while shortening time to market for new services and providing an arena for new service innovation.

One such innovation is Volvo Connect, which provides an interface for digital services, enabling companies to connect critical aspects of their business in completely new ways. The Volvo Connect platform collects events from vehicles, such as fuel status, position, mileage and, historically, fed it into a monolithic application. "This solution was never going to be able to easily scale to the volume that Volvo Connect needed, so the company into a microservice architecture where MongoDB Atlas was chosen for the live event feed replacing a self-managed MongoDB."

“Our old database required a ton of maintenance and manpower to keep going so we switched to a microservices approach built on MongoDB,” explains Erik Wernqvist, Lead Solution Architect, Volvo Group Connected Solutions. “However, after a few years we were pushing the self-managed version to its limits and found it difficult to scale.”

Volvo Connect went back to the market and evaluated a range of alternatives before deciding that the fully managed MongoDB Atlas cloud service best met its criteria: easy to manage and scalable with advanced functionality and compression. The company then plotted a seamless migration to the new platform.

THE SOLUTION

Tracking millions of daily events

Volvo Connect together with assistance from MongoDB Professional Services designed a customized migration program, which enabled it to transition 8TB of data in just 2.5 days without disrupting the business or causing downtime. The Connect platform now rests on Atlas, a powerful, modern, multi-cloud database platform, which provides an integrated suite of capabilities and services to accelerate and simplify how Volvo manages data.

“With MongoDB’s assistance, migrating to Atlas was incredibly smooth and standing up the new sharded cluster was simple,” adds Wernqvist. “It was reassuring to know we had the skills and expertise of the Professional Services team at our disposal to help ensure the project’s success.”

Now, the data for over one million vehicles around the world that generate 65 million events daily is all stored on MongoDB Atlas and made available via a customer portal, where users can see each vehicle’s event history in real-time. Users can also generate reports, plot journeys on maps and create graphs of fuel consumption among other features.

“It is principally for use by fleet managers who get much more visibility of each vehicle in their fleet and can plan more effectively as a result,” continues Wernqvist. “We use the Atlas Admin API to take metric data and push it into our dashboard automatically. That makes life much easier.”

THE RESULTS

Scalable, flexible and cost-effective

Volvo Connect now enjoys a robust, scalable and feature-rich data platform, which requires practically no maintenance investment. In fact, the database administration team who had been fully focused on managing the self-managed MongoDB has been redeployed elsewhere as Atlas can be managed by the development team itself with little effort.

“Atlas is easy to use out-of-the-box, requires minimal resources to run and the development team can solve any issues quickly,” comments Wernqvist. “It also offers enhanced visibility with statistics and visualizations that bring processes to life while reducing unnecessary queries and input/output operations per second (IOPs).”

This reduction in IOPs has made Volvo Connect 40% more efficient and reduced response times accordingly.