From Cost Center to Strategic Asset
How Monks Scaled for the AI Era with 3 Tree Tech and Axiom
A Partnership for the Next Wave of Innovation
As a future-proof partner on the front line of marketing and technology, Monks empowers its most ambitious brands to turn complexity into opportunity. This case study serves as a blueprint for how forward-thinking companies can transform a growing operational burden, observability at scale, into a powerful business enabler.
From Data Burden to Strategic Asset
As Monks expanded its Technology Services and Artificial Intelligence capabilities, its legacy data stack became a significant barrier to growth, treating the massive volumes of data generated by their platforms as a tax rather than an asset.
This document details how the strategic partnership between Monks and Three Tree Tech led to the selection and implementation of Axiom. The engagement successfully unlocked significant cost savings and performance gains, establishing the foundational AI readiness required for Monks' next wave of innovation.
The Challenge: The Burden of a Legacy Stack
For a company that promises to "turn complexity into opportunity," Monks' internal observability stack was doing the opposite. The company was drowning in data costs, forcing them to treat the massive data volumes inherent in modern digital services as a tax on growth. To manage the budget, teams were forced to sample data so heavily that they were left searching across several systems when issues arose, creating investigation bottlenecks and critical security blind spots. This approach was fundamentally misaligned with the company's strategic goals, particularly its push toward cost-neutral AI adoption.
The specific pain points had a direct and escalating impact on the business:
Operational Burden: The security and engineering teams spent an excessive amount of time managing complex logging clusters. This overhead shifted their focus from using data for insights to simply maintaining the infrastructure, creating a significant operational bottleneck.
Security Risk: Heavy data sampling meant that when issues arose, critical information was often missing. This, combined with the need to rehydrate cold logs from archival storage, a process that could take hours, dramatically increased the Mean Time To Resolution (MTTR) and slowed down crucial threat hunting activities.
Barrier to AI Innovation: The massive event streams generated by Monks.Flow, their AI-driven workflow platform, threatened to create an explosion in observability costs. This financial pressure acted as a direct barrier to the company's strategic goal of achieving "cost-neutral AI adoption," hindering innovation before it could even scale.
As Global Director of CyberSecurity, Alexander Wold noted the situation was untenable:
"Our previous observability stack was doing the opposite--it was turning our data scale into a financial burden. We viewed logging as a tax we paid for compliance."
This clearly defined problem demanded a new strategy, one that began with finding a partner who could architect a fundamentally different approach to data at scale.
The Strategy: Three Tree Tech’s Five Filters for Mitigating Risk
Monks’ mandate for Three Tree Tech was clear: move beyond simply recommending tools and instead architect a holistic technology strategy that would eliminate risk and directly serve their core business objectives. Our role as a strategic advisor is to "Empower Leaders." For a foundational technology as critical as observability, a recommendation is insufficient; what is required is a rigorous, multi-faceted vetting process to de-risk the decision and ensure long-term alignment.
To achieve this, we applied our proprietary Five Filters methodology, a risk mitigation framework designed to assess technology partners across critical dimensions of technology, finance, people, and process.
1. The Technology Filter
Identifies vendors and modern architectural shifts that reduce technical debt and provide a competitive advantage.
2. The Process Filter
Vets for best-in-bred processes, such as iterative product management, such as iterative product management and customer-informed feedback loops.
3. The Financial Filter
Analyzes a partner’s funding strategy and business model to validate long-term viability and sustainable growth.
4. The People Filter
Assess the cultural and operational alignment of the partner’s team, from visionaires to operators.
5. You: The Final Filter
Assess the cultural and operational alignment of the partner’s team, from visionaires to operators.
"3 Tree Tech didn't just find us a tool, they vetted a partner."
This strategic vetting process confirmed that Axiom was not just a tool, but the right partner to help architect Monks' future-proof technology stack.
Goals & Technology Filters
Our Tech Scout pillar identified Axiom as a "modern architectural shift" away from the limitations of legacy indexing. The purpose of this filter was to de-risk the implementation by ensuring the chosen solution would eliminate existing tech debt rather than create a new layer of it. We assessed Monks' fragmentation and management-intensive setup, and Axiom's schema-less ingestion and serverless architecture were identified as the ideal solution to eliminate this debt.
People & Process Filters
Technology is implemented by people, and a successful partnership requires cultural and operational alignment. Through this filter, we vetted Axiom's engineering team to confirm their vision aligned with Monks' culture of iterative product management. This ensured that Monks would be working with a responsive and collaborative partner, capable of evolving with their needs and providing direct access to engineering expertise when required.
Financial Filter
This filter was a critical component of de-risking the decision for Monks’ leadership. As Alexander Wold astutely noted, the goal was to avoid "trading one risk for another." We conducted a deep analysis of Axiom’s funding strategy and business model to validate their long-term viability and positive EBITDA trajectory. This gave Monks' leadership the confidence that they were choosing a sustainable partner built for growth, not a "flash in the pan" that might hike prices or fail.
The Solution: Architecting for AI Readiness and Governance
Architecting for the AI Era: From Cost Center to Strategic Asset
With a thoroughly vetted partner in Axiom, our focus shifted to architecting a solution that would solve immediate security needs while future-proofing Monks' entire technology stack for the AI era. The implementation was designed to transform their data pipeline from a costly necessity into a scalable, secure, and insightful asset.
The core components of the solution delivered immediate and strategic value:
Future-Proofing for Monks.Flow: We architected the solution around Axiom's Volumetric Logging capability, its power to ingest and analyze massive data streams cost-effectively, eliminating the trade-off between visibility and budget that had previously blocked AI initiatives. This created a high-throughput observability pipeline capable of absorbing telemetry from the thousands of distributed systems that power Monks.Flow, making the AI platform economically and operationally viable at scale.
Instant Security and Governance Uplift: We implemented strict, need-to-know data governance controls within Axiom, ensuring sensitive client data was protected by default. This new architecture struck the perfect balance between Glass Box transparency for developers with ironclad security for the data, providing engineers with zero-sampling visibility for debugging while simultaneously enforcing robust security.
Seamless, Zero-Configuration Integration: To eliminate complexity and management overhead, the technical strategy standardized on modern, open standards. Monks leveraged OpenTelemetry for its microservices and the Axiom Events API for custom security tools. This, combined with seamless integrations for key technologies like Cloudflare and AWS, allowed them to ingest data from anywhere with zero configuration.
Global Principal Security Engineer, Drew Gowan confirmed the success of the architecture:
"Axiom provided the AI Readiness we needed for Monks.Flow. We achieved a modernized, serverless architecture that improved our security instantly giving us data governance at scale without sacrificing the visibility our engineers require."
This newly architected solution set the stage for a dramatic and measurable impact on the business.
The Results: From Financial Burden to Strategic Business Asset
Global agency Monks was trapped by a legacy data platform that created high costs and security blind spots, forcing a strategic shift to unlock growth.
The engagement transcended simple cost-cutting. It fundamentally repositioned Monks' observability data from a financial liability into a strategic asset that fuels both security operations and new business growth. The results were immediate, measurable, and felt across every level of the organization.
The key quantifiable outcomes provided a powerful return on investment:
40% Reduction in Observability Spend: Freeing up significant budget to expand client-facing Security Services.
65% Reduction in Mean Time To Resolution (MTTR): Empowering engineers to troubleshoot errors and latency spikes with unprecedented speed.
95% Data Compression: Enabling Monks to increase data retention far beyond compliance requirements at a minimal cost.
100% Visibility: Eliminating the security and performance blind spots caused by heavy data sampling and empowering engineers with complete, real-time access to all telemetry data.
Beyond the metrics, the strategic outcomes transformed how different teams approached their work.
>> For Alexander Wold, Global Director of Cybersecurity: Driving ROI and Service Expansion
The cost savings and efficiency gains allowed Monks to create a "cost-neutral AI adoption framework" for telemetry data. This directly enabled the strategic expansion of their own Security Services, turning an internal cost center into a client-facing revenue driver and a powerful competitive advantage. "This efficiency allows us to pass value back to our clients, offering them superior protection without the premium price tag usually associated with this level of visibility and capability.
>> For Drew Gowan, Global Principal Security Engineer: Achieving a Modern, Secure Stack
The move to a serverless, schema-less architecture eliminated years of technical debt and management overhead. The new solution struck the perfect balance between strict data governance, protecting sensitive client information, and the zero-sampling visibility developers require to innovate quickly and securely. This allowed Monks to build an observability pipeline as agile and ambitious as the products they ship.”
>> For Sergio Rovira, Sr. Application Security Engineer: Empowering Daily Operations
For the hands-on security engineers, the impact was a "game-changer." The solution was not only powerful—allowing them to query billions of events in seconds—but also remarkably frictionless. As one engineer noted, "I can hire an engineer off the street, and they immediately know how to get value out of Axiom." This combination of power and usability eliminated daily frustration and restored confidence. As Rovira stated:
"With zero sampling, I never have to say we missed an error or go searching through individual systems."
Empowering Leaders to Build the Future
The partnership between Monks and Three Tree Tech, centered on a rigorous vetting strategy, successfully transformed Monks' approach to data and observability. By applying our Five Filters methodology, we mitigated risk and identified Axiom as the ideal partner to not only solve immediate pain points but also to lay the foundation for future growth.
Monks converted a significant operational and financial burden into a strategic asset that underpins their AI ambitions, enhances their security posture, and strengthens their client service offerings. This success story exemplifies Three Tree Tech's core mission: to Empower Leaders with the vetted technology and strategic architecture needed to turn their own complexities into powerful opportunities.
Relationships.
Trust.
Outcomes.
MONKS
Monks help brands grow by orchestrating marketing and technology into unified, intelligent systems. While anyone can access powerful tools, their expertise lies in the sophisticated deployment that leads to superior outcomes. Their teams work side-by-side to turn attention into action, ideas into innovation, and data into real business value.
By uniting marketing and technology under one roof, Monks empower brands to connect more deeply, move more intelligently, and achieve what no one else can.
Visit: https://www.monks.com/
AXIOM
Axiom is a data platform designed to efficiently collect, store, and analyze event and telemetry data at massive scale. At its core, Axiom combines a high-performance, proprietary data store with an intelligent Console, helping teams reach actionable insights from their data faster.
Visit: https://axiom.co/
