How DPDzero used Scout to spend less and get more

DPDzero is an AI-powered, full-stack debt collection and recovery infrastructure platform built for financial institutions and lenders in India. They have raised $10.8 million in funding across several rounds. Their clients include Banks, NBFCs, and fintechs, such as IndusInd, Aditya Birla Capital, and L&T Finance.

DPDzero's engineering team was running observability through a stack of CloudWatch, AWS-native tooling, Sentry, and Performance Insights.

Publishing metrics was difficult, as was tracing.

It all traced back to the same gap: these tools were never built to share a common data model or trace context. Each captured its own slice, metrics somewhere, errors somewhere else, with no thread connecting them. Reconstructing what happened for one request meant dashboard hopping manually, and checking on system health became a time sink.

Part of the time-consuming nature was tied to the fact that system reliability rested on the shoulders of one engineer. For one person to try and work across a distributed, inefficient stack was incredibly difficult. Naturally, the CTO wanted system reliability to be every engineer's responsibility. This meant cost was increasingly part of the picture too.

Incumbent tools' per seat pricing model meant that having every engineer responsible for system reliability would quickly balloon costs. A high cost is one thing, a high cost that isn't justifiable against the outcomes is another. Even so, the real frustration was operational: not enough database visibility, and a setup that made observability a siloed chore.

There was a deeper pattern underneath this, too. Features shipped, teams moved on, and if something degraded post-launch, DPDzero typically found out from a support ticket or from someone happening to eyeball an existing dashboard, rather than from any built-in way of knowing.

Call abandonment rate more than halved, going from above 50% to less than 25%. That reliability now shows up in day-to-day engineering habits, too: engineers check the dashboard the morning after a release as a matter of course, rather than waiting to be told something broke, which has caught regressions within the first hour of release that would previously have gone unnoticed for days.

DPDzero wanted to expand their monitoring both vendor and client-side. For their vendors, to monitor performance and evaluate the cost-benefit of each vendor. For their clients, DPDzero wanted to monitor their own performance towards the KPIs they used to benchmark their work in collections. Working with base14, they were able to add customized instrumentation that provided the team visibility on both of these - helping them view their cross-functional systems more holistically, empowering themselves to make more informed decisions.

DPDzero even brought in different business units into their observability system - their operations team is now able to monitor their outbound service more efficiently, and operations leaders can see what is working well via metrics.

Scout MCP has been a major reason DPDzero continues to value our partnership. The MCP has helped engineers easily analyse what's happening in the system, helped narrow issues to a particular point, and respond quicker - improving system reliability and nipping issues in the bud. Dashboard creation itself has become part of how DPDzero ships: a feature doesn't go live until its dashboard, covering the metrics, traces, and business counters that show whether it's doing what it was built to do, exists and is on the release checklist. To keep that from becoming manual overhead, DPDzero set up a GitHub workflow that uses LLMs to help generate these dashboards on an as-needed basis for every new feature they deploy.

Setting up or transferring to a new observability system can be a daunting task, which is why we at base14 provide hands-on support not just at onboarding, but continually after that. base14 engineers worked closely with the team at DPDzero to set up custom instrumentation, and we continue to have fortnightly meetings.

Ongoing collaboration is built into how base14 works with our customers, not a one-time step at handoff.

This is the shape the partnership takes by design: base14's service model treats continued engagement as part of the product itself, not a support function layered on top of it.

DPDzero came in with a cost problem downstream of a tooling and responsibility problem. What kept them was the support, the product itself, a workflow built around OpenTelemetry standards, an MCP integration that gave them something no one else did, and a level of cross-functional customization that turned observability from a chore into infrastructure they trust.