19 September, 2025
12d Synergy was born in 2011 to help rebuild after the devastating Christchurch earthquakes. The platform unites documents and files across the isolated systems used in the architectural, engineering, and construction (AEC) industries, helping thousands of users work smarter.
Unlike most organisations that approach Modern Observability to manage scaling issues and noisy alerts, 12d Synergy came from a place of genuine curiosity and desire for visibility over real-world application use.
Their architecture means each customer has their own instance, rather than 12d supporting a single distributed application; instead of prioritising platform stability and getting on top of an ocean of alerts, they were instead focused on understanding how their application performed in production across diverse customer deployments.
Midnyte City was engaged to implement Modern Observability into their application and development culture.
The implementation focused on two key initiatives:
OpenTelemetry Implementation
Configured OpenTelemetry SDK with exporters to Honeycomb as the observability backend of choice
Enabled auto-instrumentation for database libraries, ORMs, communication libraries, and cloud SDKs
Developed custom instrumentation for complex built-to-purpose workflows
Implemented custom context propagation for specialised workflows not captured by auto-instrumentation
Knowledge Uplift and Culture Change
Integrated the Midnyte City consultant into the development team's agile workflows to build rapport and provide ongoing guidance
Conducted hands-on pairing sessions where team members completed instrumentation work independently with support as needed
Delivered four targeted workshops:
OpenTelemetry and Modern Observability fundamentals
Semantic conventions and sampling strategies
Pre-mortem session for familiarisation with observability tooling
SLO-setting workshop, demonstrating how observability can align the development lifecycle with product management
12d Synergy achieved comprehensive visibility into their application's runtime behaviour, ready to be rolled out to customers. The team can now proactively identify performance bottlenecks and usage patterns that were previously invisible, enabling data-driven development decisions.
The engineering team gained independence in observability practices, with all developers able to instrument new features and investigate issues using modern observability tooling. The shared observability language and practices established through the workshops created a sustainable culture of observability that continues beyond the engagement.
With the instrumentation groundwork done, newer releases of the application will enhance the ease of debugging production application issues, improving the efficiency of 12d’s support teams.
"It’s been a real pleasure having Midnyte City work with us over the past 3 months. Thanks to Matt for all his efforts. I’m really pleased with what he was able to put together and for the cultural change he inspired in the team."
Richard Stoliar, CTO, 12d Synergy
If you would like to speak to someone about similar challenges in your team or organisation, reach out below to schedule a time.