How a Financial Services Leader Gained Visibility with DEM

Maintaining digital performance has always been a tough balancing act for the Financial Services industry. Every transaction must be encrypted and secured; customer data must be stored safely without the risk of a breach. Security is given the highest priority, the additional processes in the service delivery chain can tax performance. Financial service providers must go the extra mile to ensure their network is resilient with high performance, availability, reliability, and reachability. The user will opt-out of any service that does not provide a secure yet consistent digital experience.

Financial institutions are continually investing in building robust and resilient IT infrastructure to keep up with ever-evolving technology. API services and other third-party integrations are essential to financial service providers and visibility into every level of the delivery chain is crucial to maintaining optimal end-user experience.

A leading financial service provider needed a DEM platform to gain end-to-end visibility of their services. Catchpoint’s comprehensive testing capabilities helped the service provider fill the gaps and blind spots in their monitoring strategy.

Reactive to Proactive

The monitoring strategy and tools used by this financial service provider were unable to gather the right metrics and insights and this meant they were in constant firefighting mode. The existing resources were not efficient enough and resulted in –

• missed revenue opportunities
• too many false positives
• unchecked SLA breaches
• degraded application performance

The Catchpoint DEM platform brought in an improved and comprehensive monitoring strategy. For example, the customer was struggling to identify an ongoing performance incident, it took the team over 48 hours to troubleshoot the issue. When a similar incident occurred, within 15 minutes of setting up relevant tests using Catchpoint, the root cause was determined to be the load balancer.

We helped the company shift to proactive monitoring that combined the right testing methodologies, metrics, alerts and data visualizations. And this proactive approach translated to a lower MTTR (mean time to resolve) and a significant improvement in overall performance.

Monitoring Feature Deployment and Cloud Migration

The service provider made constant changes to their web application and this meant the QA and test environments should be running optimally to deal with specific functionality changes. For example, a new version of the application login page was scheduled for release. The service provider had to ensure they had a proactive monitoring tool in place with the required testing capabilities to analyze performance effectively.

Another requirement the customer had was planning an AWS migration. The migrating involved several components that were vital to application availability and performance. The existing monitoring toolset had limited visibility and was unable to provide historical data analysis. Without a comprehensive monitoring solution, the customer was risking end-user experience and a possible loss of revenue if the migration caused performance issues.

With Catchpoint, the customer was able to gain complete visibility into the different components of the application. They were able to analyze performance data over time as well as evaluate different performance metrics at a granular level and this helped them plan and execute a successful cloud migration.

Efficient Third-Party Integrations

Financial service providers rely on APIs and other third-party integrations to build a secure, intuitive, and feature-rich application. The application is expected to have 100% availability without compromising security. Customer transactions must complete within the expected time. A time out page or a failed transaction can be a major setback for the end-user experience. For example, consider a scenario where the user transaction requires a one-time password (OTP) and the OTP functionality fails. This has a negative impact on the end-user experience.

In addition to these services, the customer was using multiple internal tools (such as Splunk, ServiceNow) to help their DevOps and SRE teams. Catchpoint could integrate seamlessly with their existing tools and bring data from different systems to a single platform making it easier for teams to work together.

The Catchpoint Difference

The customer was using different monitoring tools internally for the application and a separate synthetic solution for the external application. But they wanted a single platform that would help scale and manage both the internal and external application components. The lack of visibility was also a major concern. After shifting to Catchpoint the customer implemented an improved monitoring strategy that had a significant impact on the application performance. They now had a complete toolset to monitor external and internal applications that could be used by multiple teams (Dev/test, operations, SRE). The customer cited the following features that helped achieve their monitoring goals:

• Multiple synthetic monitors including API, DNS, web, and transaction tests.
• Ease of use and integration Capabilities
• Real-time alerting capabilities
• Accurate and trusted data
• Longer data retention that enables better historical data analysis
• Comprehensive data visualization
• 24/7 customer support

The changes in the monitoring strategy resulted in:

• Optimized end-user experience
• Unified platform for multiple teams across the organization
• Improved incident management
• Better SLA management
• Increased employee productivity
• Improved brand value and increased customer loyalty

Read more about the role of DEM in the financial services industry and understand how increasing customer expectations and digital transformation have reshaped IT monitoring demands. Download the ebook.