Saving IT operations labor for important activities (like enjoying labor day…)

Labor Day is quickly approaching. Many of us will take time this weekend to visit family, relax at the beach, or BBQ anything that doesn’t get away from the grill fast enough. We here at INETCO are excited to celebrate Labo(u)r Day (we’re Canadian, eh)—and are especially glad that we’ve given our IT operations customers more time to enjoy this last long weekend of summer…

How can INETCO provide someone with more time? I’m so glad you asked.labor day bbq

You see, in a typical IT operations department, 46 hours per month is spent in “war rooms” (TRAC Research. APM Spectrum Report. 2013). For examplewhen a retail bank detects a pattern of failed consumer interactions, they immediately set to work trying to find the root cause and restore services as fast as possible. This can be a very labor intensive, time-consuming, trial-and-error process. The gap between problem discovery and problem resolution often requires a coordinated effort across multiple teams: a war room consisting of ATM operations, network operations, applications support, 3rd party service providers, and others.

Many of these IT operations groups use their own respective diagnostics tools, and many of these tools are not routinely run in production because they add too much overhead to system operation. As a result, information on the problem is fragmented and not immediately forthcoming. Everyone has to wait for the issue to reoccur, or attempt to reproduce it. All of these activities add significant latency and operational overhead to the problem resolution process.

That is, unless you have some type of secret weapon that immediately alerts you to any issues occurring on your network (eg: if more than 2% of transactions are failing at any given ATM). A solution that monitors every transaction through each of its “hops” across your payments architecture in real-time. An efficient method to capture all of your transaction traffic, and then drill down to see exactly where problems are occurring. Fortunately, at least for our customers, INETCO Insight is this secret weapon.

As Jason De Swardt, head of Nedbank’s new Payment Services Hub describes:

“Nedbank is experiencing a period of explosive growth and is investing in modernizing our banking architectures and processing systems. As our banking IT infrastructure grows, so does the complexity of monitoring transactions. INETCO Insight is envisioned to be our not-so-secret weapon when it comes to real-time transaction slowdown troubleshooting, improving problem isolation times by up to 75%.”

INETCO Insight is a proven software platform that provides real-time monitoring and analytics for transactions spanning all self-service banking channels. What makes this solution unique is its ability to capture and correlate multi-protocol transactions across multiple hops, while operating independently of the underlying application being monitored. INETCO Insight’s real-time correlation engine brings all this information together into a single transaction record, providing
 a complete end-to-end view into the performance of every transaction. Line of business executives, IT operations teams and applications support teams receive instant notification when transactions slow down, time out or fail. And working from a common data set enables these teams to collaborate more effectively and quickly isolate third party system response issues, network communications failures, underperforming application components or infrastructure bottlenecks–on average 65-75% faster, and without the need to assemble a war room.

transaction profile
INETCO Insight automatically creates a profile of each transaction that maps bottlenecks, slowdowns and network transport errors to the underlying infrastructure

Below is a model that breaks out the time and labor cost savings that a typical INETCO customer may experience using INETCO Insight.

 

inetco insight business impact model

In the above model, the retail bank using INETCO Insight is able to save roughly $140K a year in labor costs—labor and time savings which can be applied to more lucrative, strategic projects—or in the case of Labor Day, a pretty great company BBQ.

For an independent report on how INETCO Insight allows organizations to be more effective with their labor, read the TRAC Vendor Index on Application Performance Management. To learn more about how your organization can improve operational efficiency (and maybe even BBQ skills) contact  to arrange for a personal demonstration of INETCO Insight.