System Observability & Platform Operations
You can't run mission-critical commerce on a platform you can't observe and control. When something goes wrong at 2am—a cache issue, a failed job, a degraded API response—the difference between a ten-minute resolution and a two-hour outage is whether your team has the right visibility and controls in place before the incident, not after.
Virto ships observability as a native platform capability, not as an integration requirement. The System Operations console consolidates operational control into one documented interface. The OpenTelemetry module adds industry-standard OTLP observability across metrics, distributed tracing, and structured logging—and adds zero overhead when not configured. Both shipped in May 2026 as first releases.
Key Platform Operations Capabilities
- System Operations console: Health, background jobs, Swagger, GraphQL, cache reset, platform restart, data import/export, and module load sequence—all consolidated into one documented control surface.
- Engine-agnostic Background Jobs: Run bulk and recurring work on the engine you choose (Hangfire, RabbitMQ, or in-memory), with map/reduce fan-out, checkpoint-and-resume, live progress, automatic retries with a dead-letter queue, and autoscaling by queue depth.
- OpenTelemetry module—OTLP: Zero overhead when not configured. Activates on demand for environments that require observability infrastructure.
- Distributed tracing: Full trace coverage across ASP.NET Core, HTTP Client, Hangfire, EF Core, Elasticsearch, Redis, and UCP—giving platform teams end-to-end request visibility across the full commerce stack.
- Metrics: ASP.NET Core, HTTP Client, Runtime, Process, EF Core, Elasticsearch, and Redis—the full set of infrastructure and application metrics needed for production monitoring.
- Structured logging: Serilog routed to OpenTelemetry via OTLP sink, with trace and span ID correlation for structured log analysis. Logs are tied to traces—not isolated entries.
- Amazon OpenSearch Service compatible: Observability data routable to AWS-managed infrastructure—no additional adapter required.
- Azure App Configuration: Centralized cloud-managed settings with Managed Identity and runtime refresh.
- Audit Logs: Compliance-grade change tracking across all platform entities—built in, not bolted on.
- Timestamp precision: Extended medium format (MM:DD:YYYY HH:MM:SS.fff) for log entries—millisecond precision for high-resolution diagnostics.
- Platform backup & restore: Back up and restore Page Builder, catalog, and platform data in one pipeline, including large restores, catalog images and files streamed directly instead of through the browser, and selecting a backup already in your storage folder.
- Admin session hardening: Cookie rotation on sign-out, configurable revalidation intervals, and hardened application cookies (HttpOnly, SameSite=Lax) keep admin sessions secure by default.
- Admin UI access, separate from API permissions: Decide whether an account can sign in to the admin back office at all, independent of the API permissions it holds, with denials taking priority over allowances.
What Platform Operations Delivers for Your Business
- Production readiness without external dependencies: Observability ships as a native platform capability. IT operations teams don't need to build monitoring infrastructure before going live—the tooling is already there.
- Zero overhead by default: OpenTelemetry activates only when configured. Environments that don't need observability infrastructure carry no performance cost for having the capability available.
- Faster incident resolution: Distributed tracing with trace and span ID correlation across the full stack means the time between "something is wrong" and "we know where" is measured in minutes, not hours.
- Bulk work that scales itself: Imports, reindexing, and mass updates resume after interruption and add capacity automatically under load.
- Compliance-grade audit trail: Change tracking across all platform entities is built in—reducing the effort and cost of compliance reporting in regulated industries.
- Centralized operational control: The System Operations console reduces the number of surfaces, tools, and undocumented admin pages platform teams have to navigate to maintain and diagnose the platform.
- Enterprise cloud integration: Azure App Configuration and Amazon OpenSearch Service compatibility mean Virto fits into existing enterprise cloud infrastructure without custom integration work.
Use Case Examples
- Platform and IT operations teams: A platform engineer needs to diagnose a degraded checkout experience during peak traffic. The System Operations console surfaces health status and background job status in one place; OpenTelemetry distributed tracing pinpoints the EF Core query causing the latency spike. Resolution in minutes, not hours.
- Enterprise IT and compliance: A regulated enterprise needs a full audit trail of platform configuration changes for a quarterly compliance review. Audit Logs provide compliance-grade change tracking across all platform entities—exportable without custom tooling.
- Multi-environment cloud deployments: A platform team running separate staging and production environments on Azure needs to push a configuration change without a restart. Azure App Configuration with runtime refresh applies the change across environments without downtime.
- AWS-infrastructure organizations: An enterprise running observability on Amazon OpenSearch Service routes Virto's OpenTelemetry output directly to their existing AWS-managed infrastructure—no additional adapter, no custom integration.
Your Questions, Answered
The System Operations console is a single documented control surface for platform health, Hangfire job management, Swagger API documentation, GraphQL exploration, cache management, platform restart, data import/export, package JSON download, and module load sequence. It consolidates the operational controls that platform and IT teams need into one place, removing the need to navigate multiple undocumented admin surfaces.
The OpenTelemetry module provides industry-standard OTLP observability—metrics, distributed tracing, and structured logging—via an OTLP exporter. It adds zero overhead when not configured. The module activates only in environments where observability infrastructure is explicitly set up, meaning production environments that don't need it carry no performance cost.
Distributed tracing covers ASP.NET Core, HTTP Client, Hangfire, EF Core, Elasticsearch, and Redis—the full commerce stack. Trace and span ID correlation is applied to structured log entries via Serilog, meaning logs and traces are connected rather than isolated.
Is Virto's observability compatible with AWS and Azure infrastructure?
Yes. Observability data is routable to Amazon OpenSearch Service for AWS-managed infrastructure. Azure App Configuration is supported for centralized cloud-managed platform settings with Managed Identity and runtime refresh—no restart required to apply configuration changes.
The unified backup pipeline covers Page Builder, catalog, and platform data in a single operation—ensuring the full platform state is recoverable without separate backup processes per component.
Yes. Compliance-grade change tracking across all platform entities is built into Virto Commerce by default. No external tooling or additional configuration is required to generate or access audit logs.
This capability set is designed for platform engineers, IT operations, and enterprise architects—not commerce administrators. The System Operations console and OpenTelemetry module are infrastructure-level capabilities for teams responsible for platform health, performance monitoring, and compliance in production environments.
