Schroders, a British multinational asset management company headquartered in London, England, manages £778 billion of assets for clients and employs more than 6,000 employees across six continents. With such scale comes immense responsibility, to customers, to regulators, and to the business itself. Mario Fonseca, Head of Security Engineering and Infrastructure Automation and Observability, shares his journey from forensic science into IT, how Schroders uses LogicMonitor to gain visibility and resilience, and why observability is becoming a critical function across financial services.
The quick download: Schroders scaled resilience through automation and one source of truth.
A lean team oversees 500+ services by treating ops as code, automating guardrails, and measuring success by reliability and resilience.
LogicMonitor Envision replaced fragmented tools with agentless collectors, programmatic Dashboards, and extensible DataSources to standardize monitoring across regions.
Audit logs feed the SIEM; capacity and uptime reporting support regulators such as the FCA and MAS; fewer incidents strengthen customer confidence.
Recommendation: Make observability a value-add. Standardize on a single source of truth, automate remediation thoughtfully, and use Edwin AI to cut through noise.
Q: You’ve had quite an interesting career journey. Is it true you come from a forensic science background?
Mario: Yes, but that was nearly 20 years ago now. Thanks for reminding me of my age. [Laughs] I studied neuropharmacology and then did a master’s in forensic science. But a friend said to me, “You know what? The money’s not really in forensics, it’s going to be in IT.” That conversation changed everything.
I pivoted, worked in local government for a while, travelled, and then moved into financial services. My roots were in Unix and Linux, always with a focus on automation. I’ve often been the one handed tools with unusual names and asked to figure them out. Looking back, it was a natural progression into observability.
Q: And you’re celebrating 10 years at Schroders. What does your role cover today?
Mario: Schroders is a 200-year-old institution. We’re customer-centric in everything that we do, which means always setting the standard for exemplary active asset management and advisory services.
My team oversees 500 different services. We run like a Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team, which means treating operations as code, automating as much as possible, and measuring success by reliability and resilience. In practice, that means we’re constantly balancing speed with safety. We need to move quickly, but always with the right guardrails.
Q: What prompted Schroders to build an observability program?
Mario: Before LogicMonitor, things were very fragmented. We had limited visibility of our own infrastructure, and we were operating in silos. We’re a global organisation operating across six continents, and different regions had different tools, with New York, London and Singapore all running their own monitoring. There was no standardisation, no single source of truth.
LogicMonitor’s agentless collector-based observability platform was a big factor. We started using it as an overlay, running alongside vendor tools, and quickly realised the value. Regions began adopting it, we consolidated platforms, and eventually LogicMonitor became our global monitoring solution. Its extensibility was critical too. If something wasn’t covered out of the box, we could create our own data sources.
Q: Financial services are a constant target of bad actors. How do you address those threats?
Mario: Operational resiliency and security are mission-critical. There’s so much at stake, with billions of assets under management. We’re always working to reduce attack surfaces, applying the “least privilege” principle [a cybersecurity best practice], and making sure monitoring doesn’t create new vulnerabilities.
Observability isn’t just about seeing when things go wrong. It’s also about preventing incidents. Automation plays a role here too. How do we remediate issues automatically while staying safe? It’s always a balancing act between going fast and staying secure.
Q: Schroders is also highly regulated. Does that create unique challenges?
Mario: In the U.K. we’re overseen by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), but we’re also governed by regulators in other areas where Schroders operates, like Singapore’s Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS). And then there are frameworks like GDPR General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA).
LogicMonitor provides reliable audit logs, which we feed into our security information and event management tool. It also supports capacity management and uptime reporting. Fewer outages mean fewer uncomfortable conversations with regulators.
Q: Which LogicMonitor features have been most valuable for you?
Mario: Different teams would answer differently. Some love the Dashboards. Being able to build them programmatically is a big win. For me, extensibility has been key. We can customise alert payloads and automate a lot of processes ‘as code.’
The Resource Explorer is great for quick sanity checks. We’re also exploring LM Logs and anomaly detection, and we’re intrigued by Edwin AI. Anything that helps us see the wood for the trees is invaluable.
Q: Looking ahead, what industry trends do you think are most critical?
Mario: I’ve done really well so far not to mention AI but yes, it’s everywhere. AI and LLMs are going to become baseline, part of every product.
The challenge is data. Just because you have more doesn’t mean it’s useful. We need to work out what good looks like, and how to do it cost-effectively. Another challenge is mindset. Developers often treat monitoring as an afterthought. We need to make observability a value-add, not just a box-ticking exercise.
Q: On a personal note, what does LogicMonitor mean to you?
Mario: Honestly, peace of mind. Early on, I suggested a more gradual upgrade rollout and LogicMonitor listened. Now upgrades just happen. I don’t worry about them. That’s not true with every SaaS vendor.
Having a trusted partner who listens is important. It means I can spend less time firefighting and more time focusing on what really matters both at work and outside of it.
Q: Any final advice for your peers in financial services?
Mario: Don’t get dazzled by hype, but don’t ignore it either. AI and automation will reshape what we do, but the fundamentals remain the same—resiliency, security, and customer trust. Observability is central to all those. Get it right, and you’re not just fixing problems, you’re preventing them.
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Jessica Noland helps B2B brands unlock the power of their happiest customers by showcasing real-world successes. She first caught the technology bug during her time at Spiceworks (IYKYK) and has been celebrating the humans behind tech tools ever since. When she's not busy being "customer obsessed" at LogicMonitor, she enjoys cooking, book club, and camping in the great outdoors.
Disclaimer: The views expressed on this blog are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of LogicMonitor or its affiliates.
