When your monitoring can't keep up with your growth

How BUK, the HR and payroll platform trusted by companies across Latin America, moved from a broken observability setup to full visibility across their entire platform without a single day of disruption for their engineering team.

The stakes are higher than most people realise

BUK runs payroll, vacation management, performance evaluations, and benefits for companies across Chile, Brazil, Mexico, and two other countries in Latin America. Behind every one of those transactions is a person waiting to be paid correctly and on time. When the platform has a problem, it is not an abstract engineering issue. It is a real consequence for real people.

Felipe Sateler, CTO and co-founder of BUK, describes it directly: the platform needs to tell the team what they need to know, at all times. When it cannot do that, there is a problem that has to be solved.

BUK has grown very fast. That growth brings traffic, complexity, and the kind of peak periods that put every part of the system under pressure at once. And for a while, the observability setup they had in place was not keeping up.

What wasn't working

Before working with Tsuga, BUK was running an open-source observability solution. It had got them to where they were, but the team was starting to feel its limits. Visibility into what was happening across the platform was incomplete. When something went wrong, the tools made it harder than it should have been to understand why.

Willy Maikowski, Engineering Manager at BUK, puts it plainly: the team needed a new way to solve the problem of observability. Exploring logs, understanding issues, getting a global view of what was happening across the platform: none of that was easy with what they had.

For a company where reliability is not a nice-to-have but a fundamental obligation to the employees who depend on the platform, this was not a situation they could leave unresolved.

We really needed to do something about it, because there had to be something better than what we had.

— Felipe Sateler, CTO and co-founder, BUK

How Tsuga came in

Tsuga's approach to new customers is built around a proof of concept on real data, not a demo. For BUK, that meant the engineering team could see exactly what they would be getting before making any commitment. Willy and his team worked through the proof of concept alongside Tsuga's Forward Deployed Engineer, running it against their actual production environment.

The difference was immediate. Sebastián Morales, Staff Software Engineer at BUK, describes what changed: the team could now visualise traces, metrics, and logs together. That combination of information, in one place and easy to explore, was simply not something they had before.

We were able to visualize how we can see traces, metrics, logs — and that was information that we didn't have before.

— Sebastián Morales, Staff Software Engineer, BUK

The data privacy question

For a platform that handles salary information and personal employee data for companies across multiple countries, data privacy is not a compliance checkbox. It is a core responsibility to customers.

One of the things that mattered most to the BUK team during the evaluation was understanding where their data would live. Willy flags data privacy and data governance as something the team cared a lot about. The question was not just whether Tsuga worked. It was whether Tsuga could work in a way that kept BUK's data inside BUK's own infrastructure.

Felipe explains why the answer mattered: Tsuga's bring-your-own-cloud model means the data never leaves BUK's own cloud. It never goes into another provider's storage. For a company in BUK's position, operating across five countries with sensitive employee data, that is not a small thing.

The fact that we could bring our own cloud to Tsuga was very, very significant. The data never leaves our own cloud and never goes into another provider's storage.

— Felipe Sateler, CTO and co-founder, BUK

What the team has now

The proof of concept moved to a full rollout. BUK's engineering team now has what Willy describes as a new perspective on the observability they need: the ability to explore logs easily, understand issues quickly, and hold a global view of the platform in a single place. In Sebastián's words, they are working with a genuinely professional monitoring and observability tool.

The difference is not just technical. It is about confidence. Knowing what is happening across a fast-growing platform, in real time, with the data staying exactly where it should be: that is what lets BUK's engineering team focus on building rather than firefighting.

Where BUK is going

BUK is not standing still. The company continues to expand across Latin America, and the demands on the platform will grow with it. Felipe's view on what comes next is clear: the plan is to keep building on top of Tsuga to get to where their users need them to be.

That framing says something about how the two companies see the relationship. Not a vendor and a customer, but a platform and a partner, built to grow together.

We plan to continue building on top of Tsuga to get where our users need us.

— Felipe Sateler, CTO and co-founder, BUK

BUK runs HR and payroll software for companies across Chile, Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, and Peru. To see how Tsuga approaches proof of value with engineering teams at scale, get in touch.