Featured Videos
Setting you free with AMQP - Featuring the first segment from "Loki’s Cryptex: Unlocking Transaction Complexity"
The Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP 1.0) is an open standards protocol designed to lower the cost of integration through interoperable business messaging. It’s a standard being backed by the likes of Bank of America, N.A., Barclays Bank PLC, Cisco Systems, Inc., Credit Suisse, Deutsche Börse Systems, Goldman Sachs, INETCO Systems Ltd, JPMorgan Chase Bank & Co., Microsoft Corporation, Novell, Progress Software, Rabbit Technologies, VMware Inc., Red Hat, Inc., Solace Systems, Inc., Tervela, Inc., TWIST Process Innovations, WSO2, Inc., 29West Inc, and Informatica.
By complying with the AMQP 1.0 standard, middleware products written for different platforms using proprietary or legacy protocols can send high value, real time transactions across and between organizations and virtual cloud computing environments in a secure manner.
Join Loki Jorgenson, Chief Scientist at INETCO, as he discusses the AMQP movement, how it relates to business transaction management, and what this all means to the financial services industry.
For more information, visit: http://www.amqp.org
Insight of the Week Rants
We polled the INETCO team, and casually asked if they had anything to say about business transaction management. Apparently, we have no shortage of opinions and knowledge... preview the first 5, one- minute rants released this quarter, and be sure to visit the Rants & Raves page on the INETCO website to review customer testimonials and other random rants: http://www.inetco.com/company/news/rants-and-raves/
Main Article
INETCO’s Insight into Mission Critical Payment Processing Applications
Analyst Jane Clabby shares her views on how business transaction management can impact automated transaction processes.
READ THE FULL STORY >>
Written by Jane Clabby, Analyst at Clabby Analytics
This article is also available in PDF form
Introduction
Last year Clabby Analytics was headquartered in Dubai, UAE. From Dubai, we were able to expand our IT research in the Middle East - and we were also able to cover India, Russia, Eastern Europe, and the Pacific Rim more easily. Accordingly, from a research perspective, being headquartered in Dubai produced a research bonanza.
When in Dubai we gained a new appreciation for automated payment systems.
- In order to pay the apartment cooling bill, we were required to go to the utility provider’s office and wait in line to make a cash payment for cooling services. Alternatively, we could go to a bank, withdraw cash (and pay a fee on that transaction), and then deposit that cash in the cooling utility’s account. After the deposit, we needed to take our receipt, scan it, and e-mail a copy of that receipt to the cooling provider - and then wait for an e-mail response back that verifies payment receipt. Ridiculous...
- By contrast, all of our utility bills in the U.S. are paid using automated electronic cash deductions from our checking account. Issues can be disputed by phone or on the Internet before or after a payment is made. But so far, we’ve never needed to dispute a charge. So paying utility providers in the U.S. is simple, quick, and painless...
Needless to say, after our Dubai experiences we recognize the value of automated payment processing. And because we have this newfound appreciation for payment systems - and because we also cover the emerging business transaction processing marketplace - when we see an interesting payment processing application or management product, we write about them. INETCO Insight is one such product.
Why INETCO Interested Us
INETCO Insight is a business transaction management product designed to help manage complex transaction flows across multiple hops in payment processing environments. In Dubai, the payment processing systems described earlier were comparatively simple when contrasted with the automated transaction processes of today. In Dubai, paying in person - although highly inconvenient for the customer - made life simple for the creditor. By forcing customers to pay manually, Dubai creditors eliminated the need for:
- customer identification authentication;
- customer account access
- balance/credit information verification;
- payment deduction from an account; and,
- payment transfer to the creditor/merchant.
This made life simple for the creditor - but complicated for the customer. In more up-to-date geographies, customers want bill processing to be handled automatically - and this automated payment processing requires all of the above mentioned steps in order to complete transactions automatically.
Why INETCO’s Business Transaction Management Environment Is Important
In the financial services industry, transactions can be "dauntingly complex", with many transactions often comprised of several groups of smaller transactions. Further, all transactions are mission critical (people are quite sensitive if their money matters are handled incorrectly). And activities such as new service roll-outs, migrations to modular web-based applications, ever-changing compliance regulations, mergers and customer acquisitions have resulted in the need for more robust troubleshooting, analysis and on-demand reporting solutions.
In a typical day, billions of transactions are processed and applications are spread across legacy systems as well as distributed systems with multiple layers of networking, servers, middleware, storage and applications. And in many cases, today’s monitoring tools have been designed to monitor individual components within networks, or on storage devices, and within servers - managing each environment in a "siloed" fashion.
Accordingly, isolating and solving a customer problem can be a lengthy, expensive proposition.
As a result, payment processing is a segment of the financial services market where understanding transaction behavior is particularly important - following a transaction from beginning to end in a distributed systems environment or a cloud is a complex endeavor. Tracking the behavior of applications and transactions involves following applications and transactions as they hop from server to server making database calls, and reads and writes along the way. "Deep dive" application performance monitoring tools simply aren’t capable of stitching together complex transactions.
Payment processing applications require both application performance management (APM) and business transaction management (BTM) tools which, when used together, can isolate the source of performance issues and then find the root cause of the problem for more timely, more accurate, more cost-effective, and most importantly, proactive problem resolution. This is what INETCO Insight does.
A Closer Look at APM and BTM
Traditional monitoring tools look at infrastructure components and the individual performance of these servers, networks, databases and applications. This realm of tools provides little in the way of information on transaction performance since transactions span multiple layers. Issues affecting performance can even happen between layers, so unless a monitoring tool can piece together all the steps of a transaction, problem isolation can be very time-consuming and costly, with each support team being asked to look for potential issues in their piece of the puzzle. And in virtualized environments, tracking transactions becomes even more complex - not only do tools need to move between layers but they must be virtual machine (VM) aware.
As a result, a new breed of tools has emerged, business transaction management (BTM) tools that have the ability to follow an application from infrastructure layer to infrastructure layer, from physical to virtual and from a private cloud to a public cloud. These new tools are typically used in conjunction with an application performance management (APM) tool that, once a transaction problem has been isolated, can provide "deep-dive" code-level diagnostics. A BTM tool makes an APM tool much more efficient by finding and isolating the issue in a fraction of the time it would take an administrator to piece together diagnostics from a variety of application monitoring tools. BTM provides a top-down view, whereas APM looks at it from the bottom-up.
With the market increasingly moving to service level agreements (SLA’s) both in public cloud environments and private clouds, performance monitoring and management must be proactive. And in order to address performance issues before SLA’s are breached, customers must have visibility into both application performance and transaction status.
About INETCO
Based in Burnaby, British Columbia, INETCO was founded in 1984. Originally focused on lower level networking gateways connecting legacy (SNA/SDLC, x.25, bisync) systems to IP for payment processing and financial services companies, INETCO soon realized that the greater customer demand was for their management and monitoring capabilities. In 2007, INETCO began offering INETCO Insight (transaction management and monitoring) as a separate product.
Today the INETCO product line includes:
- INETCO BankLink - communications gateway software providing protocol conversion, transaction aggregation, multi-host support and network management. BankLink provides a TCP/IP interface to legacy protocols, such as SNA/SDLC, X.25, and 3270 BSC that are typically used on ATM networks,
- INETCO POSway - POSway connects any dial-up terminal to a transaction host or switch by providing protocol conversion for TCP/IP and other dial-up protocols, multiple host support, transaction aggregation, and extensive web-based management capabilities. POSway supports direct T1/E1 connectivity, making it possible for companies to utilize generic telecommunications networks and eliminate the need for third-party transaction networks.
- INETCO Insight - INETCO’s flagship product for business transaction management and monitoring ( described in more detail below)
- INETCO Professional Services - Training, installation, configuration, report customization and business transaction analysis services
INETCO’s customer base includes banks, retailers and card processors with 150 customers in 50 countries. INETCO recently inked a deal with Jack Henry and Associates, a provider of computer systems and ATM/debit card/ACH transaction processing for financial services companies. INETCO’s strategy is to leverage their strength and reputation in payment processing to explore adjacent markets in banking, fraud, settlement, and trading applications with a goal of serving the general eCommerce market by 2013.
Flagship customers include Fidelity National Information Services, TNS, Open Solutions
Canada, First Data, Travelex, North Shore Credit Union, Diebold, Petro-Canada and Nokia-Siemens.
INETCO Insight - A Closer Look
INETCO Insight gives users the ability to assemble a complete picture of a payment processing transaction (such as Automated Teller Machine or Point-of-Sale) as it traverses across virtualized servers, networks, switches and applications and even to third-party service providers. Data provided includes response times, network and application delays and transaction status as well as:
- Transaction type;
- Terminal ID of ATM/POS machine;
- PAN of card;
- Transaction throughput;
- Transaction volume ratio;
- Speed and failure rates of key initiatives;
- Rate and duration of good/bad transactions;
- Rate of closes;
- Reversals;
- Management transactions; and,
- Concurrent transactions.
From this consolidated dashboard view, administrators can isolate bottlenecks, failures and connectivity issues. INETCO Insight also includes standard reports for transaction analysis and application performance and the ability to export data to external databases for ad hoc queries. INETCO Insight supports a range of transaction types with built-in decoding libraries that recognize and decode ISO 8583, Visa 2, HTTP, and XML-based financial transaction types
INETCO Insight is server-based software made up of three components:
The Event Collector captures transactions with event collectors that listen to network traffic from a SPAN or TAP port on a managed Ethernet switch.
The Event Processor takes information forwarded from the event processor, decodes and analyzes the information through statistical processing, correlation and analysis, real-time alerts and historical reporting.
The Web Server and Client provides a real-time dashboard view of network activity that can be grouped by network, third-party service providers, customers, terminal groupings and card types.
Figure 1 - Consolidated dashboard view assembles multiple transaction links for a seamless picture into every payment transaction flow, even across third party service providers
How INETCO Insight works
Figure 2 describes how the INETCO Insight product offering is structured — and the remainder of this subsection describes how INETCO Insight works.
Figure 2 - INETCO Insight Architecture
INETCO’s approach is unique - INETCO Insight doesn’t use a "tagging and following" approach where the messages themselves are modified by "tagging" or "stamping" them. And INETCO Insight doesn’t use agents that simulate the transaction. Instead of "tagging and following", INETCO Insight "observes and reassembles". INETCO Insight is deployed on the server, and routers are configured to forward a copy of the traffic to the server. With the router capturing the traffic and sending it back to a standalone server, there is no impact on the transaction flow - this approach reduces overhead. Because no application hooks are added (which would mean modifying the application) there is no additional testing required (to verify the "new" application). Accordingly, deployment time is reduced.
INETCO Insight’s agent-less monitoring makes it "lightweight" and easy to install and no changes to the application are required. The configurations are template-based and can be deployed in days.
What can INETCO Insight do for you
INETCO describes Insight as having a 3-D (infrastructure, application, business) view of an individual transaction that answers three key questions:
1) Did the transaction make it to the next server?
2) Did the next tier do what it was supposed to do?
3) Did the user achieve the correct business outcome?
Improved Customer Experience
By enabling administrators to quickly review thousands of payment transactions, any issues that may affect customer experience are quickly identified. And because of INETCO Insight’s ability to monitor on-premise as well as off-premise, performance of partners and third- parties can be monitored and SLAs enforced. Customer service agents can provide up-to-date status information and be more responsive.
Fraud Detection
Very important in financial transactions, real-time alerts provide instant awareness of transaction codes that warn of fraud. When fraud is suspected, INETCO Insight shortens the data gathering cycle, by providing a range of data that can be analyzed with fraud detection tools.
Enhanced Management Capabilities
With data provided by INETCO Insight, administrators can examine the impact of new technology roll-outs on transaction performance as well as facilitate capacity planning by analyzing usage patterns. Application performance and network issues can be proactively identified, lowering administrative costs and improving customer service.
Summary Observations
Monitoring and managing payment processing applications requires business transaction management tools (like INETCO Insight) that can piece together and follow transactions from beginning to end. These tools can confirm that a transaction has been completed or they can identify where a problem has occurred if a transaction has not been completed. To be effective, they must follow the transaction through multiple layers of applications, networks and servers, on-premise and off-premise. This enables administrators to offer proactive management through a "single-view" dashboard, better performance reporting, capacity planning, and fraud detection, and the ability to meet SLAs and regulatory guidelines.
Clabby Analytics likes the INETCO approach - agent-less, transaction-based monitoring that requires no application "tags" that modify the application. In mission-critical payment processing, application modifications lengthen the testing cycle, require custom integration (lengthening the deployment cycle) — delaying time-to-market and requiring more management resources.
INETCO has a solid strategy - leveraging their strength and expertise in payment processing and transaction management to explore related financial services markets and enterprise eCommerce. For enterprises that participate in these kinds of transaction-oriented markets, INETCO Insight can certainly provide a competitive edge by simplifying troubleshooting processes; by proactively managing application performance; by improving customer service; and by facilitating fraud detection. We sure wish that Dubai creditors would invest in automated payment processing applications and BTM products like INETCO Insight...
Additional Articles
If you liked this article, we recommend you also check out the following:
Simplifying Business Transaction Management - IT Business Edge - Aug 2, 2010 - by Michael Vizard
Moving From Reactive to Proactive: Why Your Existing Monitoring Tools are in the Way - gtnews.com - July 20, 2010
The Dimensions of a Business Transaction - Bloor Research - June 28th - by Simon Holloway
Why Your Switch Log Analyser Isn’t A Transaction Monitoring Solution - Business Computing World - July 1st, 2010
Success Story
A Day in the Life...
A scenario-based look at how Business Transaction Management (BTM) can impact your life READ THE FULL STORY >>
Consider life without BTM tools
Main character: Jerry
Jerry works as an IT operations manager at Smartland, a fictitious payment processor. He recently shelved the idea of deploying a Business Transaction Management tool because he thought his existing reactive monitoring strategy was good enough.
Over the past few weeks, Jerry has been responsible for maintaining “business as usual” throughout a chaotic corporate merger that has resulted in a number of new customers, service roll-outs, migration efforts and IT consolidation projects within Smartland’s payment processing environment. The growth and change has left his IT operations team struggling with an increasingly complex payment systems environment and layer upon layer of regulations and audit requirements.
It’s 4:00 pm on a Friday, and Jerry is set to wind things down. Aside from the usual false alarms, all network, switch and deep dive application performance monitoring indicators suggest the payment system is running fine.
Meanwhile, one of Smartland’s new multi-million dollar customers starts noticing that a number of their transactions are being declined. At 5:00 pm, after waiting an hour with no word from the payment processor, the frustrated customer phones in to see what is going on. The customer service desk receives an earful, and quickly phones the IT manager to see what is going on. Jerry feels a bit irritated by his inability to anticipate and proactively resolve issues, as he doesn’t usually know about them till the customer complains. He sits back down at his desk to quickly resolve the issue before he heads off for his BBQ party.
At 7:00 pm, Jerry is still stumped, and time is ticking away without a solution. With no transparency into transaction performance, he is having difficulty isolating the problem. So he sends level 1 priority incident tickets to all four associated IT teams: networking, database administrators, application development and business services. He desperately wishes that one of their fixes will resolve the problem.
At 7:30 pm, the line of business owner calls in a panic. The customer is threatening to leave, and Smartland has been hit with a big financial penalty for violation of service level agreements.
At 9:30 pm, Jerry and all four IT teams have spent hours troubleshooting and piecing together fragmented information gathered from in-bound customer calls, deep dive monitoring tools, command line traces, and transaction logs. Jerry takes all this information and makes his best guess at four possible causes:
- A congested network infrastructure path
- A recently installed switch
- Configuration errors on some of the customer’s 500 new wireless POS application interfaces
- An issue that resides with one of the major banks responsible for completing the credit card transactions
At 11:00 pm, after painful trial and error, Jerry is able to isolate the problem to a group of terminals located in two different geographic locations. He is able to conclude, with the customer’s input, that the declines are the same credit card type for both locations. After further testing and another hour of finger pointing, one of the major banks admits that the problem actually resides with them.
At midnight, Jerry starts to type up the incident report, and gather the information from all of the various teams and disparate data sources. He estimates it will take him about 3 hours to prepare, and doubts they will be able to convince the customer to remain a client of Smartland. Lack of a proactive transaction monitoring strategy has lead to serious service level violations, increased support and operational costs, and a negative customer experience. Jerry makes a note that on Monday morning he will revisit deploying BTM as a part of his new proactive monitoring strategy.
Embrace your new life with BTM tools
Main character: YOU
You are an IT operations manager at Mac Jenry, a fictitious payment processor. You recently deployed a Business Transaction Management tool based on an increasing scope of responsibility for new customers, service offerings, regulatory compliance regulations and complex payment systems.
It’s 4:00 pm on a Friday, and you are exhausted from an extremely busy week. Your BBQ and beach mindset is just about to set in when your BTM tool sends a proactive alert that notifies you transaction decline rates are higher than they should be. You think, “Okay, let’s quickly determine how large an issue we are dealing with. Then we can assign priority, mobilize the right IT team, isolate the problem and alert the business stakeholders so they can take an alternate course of action.”
By 4:05 pm you have drilled down into the real-time alert, and isolated the problem to payment transactions coming from a large customer you acquired through a recent merger. They have just rolled out over 500 wireless POS terminals, and are already uneasy about the level of service they will receive from you as their new payment services provider. Your heart skips a few beats as you realize that the pressure is on to solve this issue before it explodes. The implications go beyond a little downtime and the increased risk associated with stand-in mode... you are in danger of losing a multi-million dollar customer.
You phone the call center as they are the first line of troubleshooting for any customer related issues. You breathe a sigh of relief as the customer has not called to complain yet. You have them open a high priority incident ticket, then you get to work on analyzing the end-to-end transaction data history captured by your BTM tool.
Your BTM tool has been a life saver as it provides you with the real-time and historical transaction intelligence you need to ensure that new service roll-outs such as this work from Day 1. Without a scalable proactive monitoring strategy in place, these activities can lead to service disruption and chaos, increased support and operational costs, and a negative customer experience.
By 4:10 pm, looking at the consolidated event management console, you have determined that the issues are occurring within a group of terminals located at two different geographic locations. Looking at the transaction message types, you conclude the declines are the same credit card type for both locations.
By 4:15 pm, you have analyzed the end-to-end transaction paths, and further isolated where the bottleneck is occurring. You determine the problem does not lay with the new wireless POS terminal applications or your network infrastructure; it becomes clear by the lack of response times that one of the major banks they do business with is not able to complete the credit card transactions.
At 4:20 pm, you PDF an incident report that details the scope of the incident, the times of the first and last alert triggered, the number of transactions and customers impacted, and details around transactions that went into a “Store and Forward” state. Assessment shows you were able to solve the issue in less than 20 minutes, versus the 3 hour average resolution time prior to deploying your BTM tool. Smiling, you realize the positive impact BTM has had on revenue, operational efficiency and customer service reliability.
You send the report off to the call center and business stakeholders to prepare them for the customer’s phone call. You also phone the bank and send a copy of the report to avoid a time consuming “blamestorm”. By 4:30 pm, the bank has acknowledged the issue is on their side, and it is fixed by 5:00 pm, in time for heavy weekend payment transaction traffic and your BBQ at the beach!
The moral(s) of this story comparison is: Managing new performance challenges and risks associated with change requires a new breed of monitoring and troubleshooting tools. It pays to be prepared. BTM solutions will help you work smarter, not harder.
To discuss the difference BTM can make in your payment processing environment, contact INETCO’s business development team at sales@inetco.com.
Tips ’n Tricks
You must comply...and we can help you do it faster!
How to use INETCO Insight to produce transaction reports that meet regulatory compliance requirements. LEARN MORE >>
If you’re like most processors or banks we work with, changes in US and Canadian financial regulations mean compliance reporting is rising to the top of your priority list. And, if you’re like most processors and banks, it brings back bad memories of the last time you had to write a new host program to get a new report...it was late, incomplete, and took 25% of your processing power to create it. But you had to.
Then, you remember...INETCO Insight sees every transaction that goes through my system - and it can write them to a database. Hmmmm...
At the end of that "hmmm" is a faster solution to creating new compliance reports. INETCO Insight can capture all the transaction data you need and write it directly into an enterprise database. Using off-the-shelf reporting tools, our professional services team can create the exact reports you need to meet new compliance requirements. In a fraction of the time it would take to write a host program, and without the overhead that results from running reports against production databases.
For example:
- Several INETCO Insight customers have alerts to look for device security issues (which manifest as specific response codes). They run a report every day against the alert database to demonstrate compliance.
- An Insight customer looks for ATMs that have been moved by their owner without proper notification and configuration updates
- You could use INETCO Insight to monitor an encrypted link and ensure that every terminal is encrypting properly (yes, INETCO Insight can capture and display key aspects of encrypted transactions)
The list goes on. So, the next time you’re facing a complex transaction compliance reporting requirement, think about whether the INETCO Insight reporting system can help, and contact our professional services team at sales@inetco.com.
Webinars and Whitepapers
Just released: "Why Risk IT?" on-demand webinar, "Paving the Way to Risk-Free Change" whitepaper and "Why Your Monitoring Tools are Not Enough" whitepaper REGISTER NOW >>
On-demand Webinar (Recorded Aug 26, 2010)
Why Risk IT? A webinar on paving the way to risk-free change with business transaction management
Join INETCO’s VP of Marketing, Marc Borbas, as he discusses the emerging role of next generation APM tools, known as business transaction management (BTM), within payment processing environments. Within this webinar, he discusses:
- What’s changed and what hasn’t within the financial services industry
- New IT performance challenges and operational risks triggered by these changes
- How business transaction management meets emerging business imperatives
- BTM deployment examples from a number of payment processing customers, including TNSi, Open Solutions, Moneris Solutions, Jack Henry & Associates, North Shore Credit Union and Travelex
Register NOW, and also receive a complimentary copy of the whitepaper "Paving the Way to Risk-free Change: INETCO’s guide to consolidating IT systems and rolling out new services in a payment processing environment".
Whitepapers
Paving the Way to Risk-free Change: INETCO’s guide to consolidating IT systems and rolling out new services in a payment processing environment
The Missing Link: What Your Existing Monitoring Solutions Don't Show
What's NEWs
What’s NEWs at INETCO?
Moneris Solutions and Jack Henry & Associates, Inc. Deploy INETCO Insight |
INETCO Insight 4.6.3 Released | INETCO Insight 5.0 Beta Program | INETCO Goes Social
READ MORE >>
INETCO PRESS RELEASES
Moneris selects INETCO Insight as their Business Transaction Management Solution
Moneris Solutions has decided to implement INETCO Insight as an integral part of their proactive monitoring strategy
Read the full release
Jack Henry & Associates, Inc. Implements INETCO Insight
INETCO is excited to announced that Jack Henry & Associates, Inc. will deploy INETCO Insight to further improve customer service and reduce the possible risk of downtime in its expanding payment processing business.
Read the full release
INETCO Insight 4.3.6 Released (August 13, 2010)
The primary enhancements to INETCO Insight 4.6.3 include two bug fixes:
- A bug was fixed in the aggregation of message fragments (i.e. TCP protocol data units) into messages.
- A bug was fixed in the aggregation of messages into transactions in situations involving TCP retransmissions.
Contact support@inetco.com for further details.
INETCO Insight 5.0 Beta Program - Set to Kick off January 2011!
INETCO Insight 5.0 is all about managing the performance of complex transactions across multiple applications, protocols & network links. If you are interested in learning more, or would like to be considered as a beta participant, please contact Stacy Gorkoff, Director of Strategic Marketing, at: sgorkoff@inetco.com or 604-451-1567 ext. 113
INETCO Goes Social
There are a number of new ways you can follow us:
Rants and Raves (soon to become a blog)
Be sure to sign up for our Linked In Group - Payment Transaction Insights - Sharing IT Monitoring Strategies for the Financial Industry.
Is your current monitoring strategy missing critical information that could make, break or optimize your business? Hard question to answer. This group will take on a life of its own - with your help. If you are an IT or operations person that wants to learn about the latest monitoring technologies, collaborate on how to manage growing transaction volumes, complex multi-switch environments, cloud virtualization, and expanding payment channels, this is your forum to do so.
Overheard
Jack Henry & Associates, Inc. says it best...
READ THE QUOTE AND THE PRESS RELEASE >>
"We are implementing INETCO Insight based on the product’s ability to support our goal to continually enhance customer service, first call resolution rates, and operating efficiency. The depth of real-time transaction intelligence provided by this product will help us further streamline our support processes and eliminate the hours spent troubleshooting and piecing together fragmented information gathered from our in-bound customer calls, deep dive monitoring tools, command line traces, and transaction logs."
Larry Fitch, Operations Manager for the jhaPassPort EFT Solutions Group at Jack Henry and Associates, Inc.