How Netstar Streamlined Fleet Monitoring and Reduced Custom Integrations with Drasi
Intro
When a high-value shipping container goes silent between waystations, logistics teams lose critical visibility, risking delays that can cascade into port congestion and missed connections. Netstar, a connected fleet solutions provider supporting customers like Maersk, faced this challenge as its operations scaled. Timely notifications of delays, arrivals, and status changes became critical to keeping cargo moving efficiently through port systems.
To address growing integration complexity and the need for real-time responsiveness, Netstar adopted Drasi. Drasi, built for change-driven solutions, provides continuously updated query results and automated reactions to data changes, enabling systems to detect and respond to critical changes as they happen. This shift to Drasi became foundational to how Netstar unified its fleet data, reduced engineering overhead, and improved monitoring workflows.
Projects used
By the numbers
1
unified real-time platform
replaced multiple batch integration pipelines with a single Drasi backbone for monitoring and alerts
0
additional infrastructure components required for new use cases; new capabilities were added by simply connecting data sources and queries
> 1
business domains supported from one architecture;
a single Drasi deployment handles tracking, monitoring, alerts, billing, and contracts without rebuilding integrations
The Fragmentation Challenge
Growing operational complexity made an underlying challenge increasingly apparent. Tracking a container’s journey from pickup to port terminal required reconciling data such as vehicle identifiers, waypoints, GPS location feeds, and IoT telemetry signals from siloed systems. With each new operational or business requirement, whether monitoring vehicle health or detecting route deviations, development teams found themselves repeatedly rebuilding similar patterns.
“We were essentially rebuilding the same integration architecture for every use case,” explains Daniel Joubert, General Manager and technical lead at Netstar. “One week we’d build a dashboard for location tracking. The next week, we’d build another one for breakdown detection. The engineering overhead was unsustainable.”
Batch-based processing compounded the issue. Critical signals such as missed health reports or route delays can surface long after they occur, potentially limiting Netstar’s ability to take timely action.
Solution – Introducing Drasi for Change-driven Architecture
Rather than continue building point solutions, Netstar adopted Drasi as the backbone of its real-time data architecture. Drasi simplifies systems that must detect, evaluate, and react to data changes quickly and efficiently at scale, aligning directly with Netstar’s needs.
A Unified, Continuously Updated View
Drasi connected directly to Netstar’s existing data sources- Azure SQL databases for information such as vehicle identifiers and waypoints, and Azure EventHub for GPS location data and IoT telemetry. Drasi Continuous Queries joined this information into a single, always-current operational picture. Instead of multiple custom-built pipelines, Netstar gained a single source of truth for its fleet.
Using Drasi Reactions, Netstar defined actions that trigger when specific events occur. When a truck fails to send a health signal within its expected window, or when a delay notification indicates potential supply chain disruption, the system responds immediately without human intervention, reducing the likelihood of missed events.
Improvements Enabled by Drasi
Using the Drasi plugin for Grafana, Netstar consolidated results from Continuous Queries into one monitoring interface. Operators no longer reconciled conflicting views across separate tools; they now track vehicle health, location, alerts, and route deviations in real time from a single dashboard.
“The transformation was remarkable,” says Dustyn Lightfoot, Solution Architect. “We were able to use a single Drasi instance to support multiple business use cases without building new infrastructure or writing additional code, for example, to stand up Blazor websites. More importantly, it eliminated the ongoing maintenance burden of managing dozens of custom pipelines.”
Drasi’s flexibility also extended beyond fleet tracking. By attaching an additional data source and defining new Continuous Queries, the same Drasi instance now surfaces changes in customer billing status and the legal contracts. This work required no new infrastructure, just connecting the source and writing queries (leveraging Drasi’s custom Delta functions), providing business teams with up-to-date information without a separate integration effort.
Measurable Impact
Netstar reports tangible improvements across engineering operations and real-time responsiveness due to Drasi adoption, including:
Faster incident response: Missing health signals now trigger alerts immediately rather than being discovered later through manual checks, improving the speed and reliability of operational response.
Improved logistics coordination: Real time visibility into container movement through waystations and toward port terminals has enabled Netstar and partners like Maersk to coordinate shipments more efficiently, with automated alerts keeping all stakeholders informed as conditions change.
Reduced development overhead: Using Drasi has reduced the amount of custom development previously needed to support fleet monitoring capabilities. The same Drasi-driven architecture now supports multiple business cases, from tracking and health monitoring to route optimization.
Streamlined operator experience: Teams moved from several monitoring tools to a single Drasi-powered Grafana interface, simplifying daily operations and eliminating time spent reconciling conflicting data from different systems.
Industry Context and What’s Next
Demand for real-time supply chain visibility has intensified as global logistics disruptions highlight the risks of delayed reporting.
“Our customers don’t just want historical reports anymore. They need to know what’s happening right now and be alerted the moment something changes,” Daniel Joubert explains. “That shift from batch processing to continuous monitoring is becoming table stakes in fleet management.”
Building on this foundation, Netstar is now investigating how Drasi can support predictive maintenance- spotting patterns in vehicle health data early enough to prevent failures altogether. The same change-driven architecture could also streamline coordination across broader supply chain workflows.
The Broader Architectural Shift
Netstar’s implementation reflects a wider architectural move emerging across operational solutions: from systems that store and query data to platforms that detect and react to changes as they happen. In fleet logistics, financial systems, and industrial operations, the competitive advantage increasingly lies in eliminating the lag between event and response.
“Building custom integrations for every use case was slowing us down and limiting what we could deliver to customers,” Dustyn Lightfoot reflects. “Drasi gave us a reusable foundation that handles the hard parts, integrating disparate data sources and detecting meaningful changes, so we can focus on solving business problems rather than rebuilding infrastructure.”
The collaboration between Drasi and Netstar demonstrates how open source change-driven platforms can simplify complex operational challenges whilst providing actionable insights across distributed systems. As logistics operations evolve, architectures like Drasi’s may define the next era of competitive advantage- one where actionable insight arrives the moment conditions change.