# How Neverinstall Went From 7 to 180 Days of Searchable Logs

## Metadata

- **Canonical HTML**: https://ctrlb.ai/customers/neverinstall
- **Customer**: Neverinstall (cloud computing)
- **Use case**: Long-retention observability across multi-tenant deployments

## Behind Neverinstall's Limit-Free Observability with CtrlB

Neverinstall is a cloud PC platform that streams desktop applications to any device through a browser. Enterprises often run it inside their own cloud accounts, so a single release lands across every tenant and every cloud provider those customers use — each with 30 to 50 microservices.

**This is where CtrlB came in.**

## The challenge: Invisible limits, and observability that broke when it was needed most

Neverinstall started on New Relic, then moved to Axiom. New Relic was expensive and queries ran slower than the team needed. Axiom was cheaper but brought rate limits on columns and requests per second; queries still slowed as data grew, and logs rotated out after 7 days. Limits showed up when traffic spiked — including a night when abusive free-tier traffic cascaded across APIs, logging hit an unknown RPS cap, and production stayed down overnight with gaps in the investigation window.

The challenge was to find an observability layer that scaled with Neverinstall's infrastructure instead of capping it, kept logs for months instead of days, and stayed fast while doing both.

## The solution: One CtrlB data lake for every tenant, live in weeks

CtrlB works with the same OpenTelemetry connectors Neverinstall already ran. Neverinstall's infra team set CtrlB up across environments and tenants in one to two weeks, with CtrlB's onboarding team working alongside them.

## The results: 25x longer retention, at the same query speed

- **Log retention**: from 7 days to 180 days of searchable logs (about 25x longer)
- **Query latency**: 30 days of logs — most queries come back in under a second; none has taken more than a few seconds
- **Rollout**: live across environments and tenants in one to two weeks
- Held through a launch spike at a large East India ISP (more than 5.5 lakh / 550,000 internet users)

> Don't let migrating be the reason you don't evaluate CtrlB. This would probably be the last migration, and it is not a nine-month affair. In most cases it's a few weeks. — Lakshman Pasala, Co-founder and CEO, Neverinstall

- **Markdown mirror**: Fetch `/customers/neverinstall.md` for this page as plain Markdown