Over lunch with a customer last week, I described our next-generation transaction monitoring and application performance management software – Insight 5. He is a long time user of our software for monitoring payments transactions and he got visibly excited.
So I asked him a question:
“Why is transaction monitoring so important to you?”
His answer (paraphrased):
“We have a culture of operational efficiency across our organization and especially in IT – your software makes my people more efficient. It largely automates one of the most unpredictable and productivity-sapping IT functions for my operations team: problem isolation. What’s the source of the problem and who should work on it? You do that really well for all our payments channels. If I can apply the same process to more applications, we just get more efficient, and in a culture that values efficiency, I have a compelling business case to deploy more of your software.”
It was my turn to get excited. I asked him how he translates efficiency into a business case.
“We’re a financial services company. Every application matters because they either make money or automate a complex process that costs a lot more money to execute manually. When we have an application performance issue, it’s all hands on deck – my senior network, server, database, banking application support leads all pretty much drop what they’re doing and start digging. But the problem is likely only in one of those places, right? So 3 of the 4 are wasting their time. Not only are they wasting time, but the whole process is stealing time from other projects they have on their plate. In a culture of efficiency, this kind of waste is intolerable. My business case is simple: transaction monitoring software lets more of my people, spend more of their time, working on the projects that matter to the business.”
Transaction monitoring replaces slow, trial and error problem isolation methods with a fast, data-driven approach that improves efficiency AND delivers better availability and performance.
Besides the simplicity of his business case, the other thing that is revealing is how many people in his organization depend on our software. While the IT operations team “owns” the INETCO Insight deployment, everyone uses it.
This quarter, I’m going to write a series of articles on why transaction monitoring is so important to the various functional teams in an IT operations department, from application support, to database administrators. I’ll explore how each team can use transaction monitoring and how it helps foster a culture of operational efficiency.
Stay tuned, and if you would like to share why transaction monitoring matters is important to you, we would love to hear from you. Simply drop a line to: