Paul Grieve, the Technical Infrastructure Manager for a global card network provider, describes the challenges his team faced in monitoring a newly implemented Postilion Active/Active network that included two data centers, a third party telecom and 54 other ATM, POS and back-end service providers.
This provider processes large credit and debit transactions for high-net-worth customers across 14 countries in the Middle East and North Africa. Because end customer experience is paramount, even a one-second improvement in transaction speed would translate into significant returns.
Challenges
To ensure they could handle growing transaction volumes without lag or downtime, the global card network provider implemented a Postilion Active/Active architecture that could route a transaction through different Postilion servers based on transaction volumes being experienced at any given time.
The complexity of this new system presented challenges that included:
- Legacy monitoring and tracing tools did not provide the end-to-end transaction visibility needed
- It was getting tougher to ensure network and service level regulations for six-second authorization completion times were being met
- There was no way to quickly identify the root cause of an issue: Is it the payments switch? Card management system? Internal network? Telco provider? One of 54 service providers?
Solution
INETCO Insight provides end-to-end visibility into every customer interaction—a window into the real-time performance of a transaction as it moves across multiple applications, systems, and third party networks. With a holistic view of the payments environment, the transaction services team is alerted to customer transaction bottlenecks before they become failures. INETCO Insight gives this team the transaction level detail required to isolate whether transaction slowdowns or failures are due to the internal network, applications, or other third party service providers, speeding up average mean-time-to-repair by 65%.
Results
Paul and his team were able to realize a full return on INETCO Insight investment within four months. Some of the measurable gains included:
- 75% reduction in transaction timeouts occurring within internal network components
- Network availability gains from 99.92% to 99.96%
- 33% reduction in transaction authorization times (from 6 seconds to 4 seconds)
- 65% reduction in mean time to repair (MTTR) through streamlined troubleshooting
- Real-time alerts to:
- Lack of telco, third-party service or acquirer activity
- Data line outages
- Slow segment flows
- Low application response rates (Postilion, HSM, card mgmt.)