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Monitoring Payment Application Performance within Virtual, Cloud and Mobile Environments

July 3, 2012 by Marc Borbas — VP, Marketing, INETCO

Within banking and retail environments, application performance monitoring (APM) is changing. This is because more and more service and payment transactions are originating from alternative payment applications based in cloud, mobile or virtual environments.

Monitoring the performance of these new services and payment applications is just as critical as it is for traditional services that have been integrated within POS terminals or ATMs. But gaining real-time visibility into the performance of these off-premise applications can be tricky for a number of reasons:

• A wider choice of services and alternative payments translates into management of more message types and protocols. This can make the scaling of existing monitoring solutions cumbersome.
• More complex, distributed infrastructures present new challenges when it comes to performance isolation and capturing intelligence on the end-to-end transaction.
• The emergence of open platforms and multiple service options such as PayPal, Google, Amazon, Square, Zong, Boku, Facebook and Bitcoin adds to the risk of third party vendor issues.

These challenges leave IT operations and managed services folks struggling to deliver consistent end-customer experience across traditional and emerging payments channels. And these challenges are summarized in one question: “How am I going to manage what I can’t see?”

Cloud computing, virtualization and mobility are the main reasons for the strong rally around business transaction management (BTM) solutions among IT operations centers and managed services teams. BTM solutions can provide end-to-end transaction visibility, extending monitoring into virtual, cloud and mobile environments. They measure response times on a hop-by-hop basis, profiling transaction performance metrics that reflect network performance, application performance and what the end customer is actually experiencing.

Response time measurements are a sure and simple way to pinpoint when and where transaction performance degradation is occurring within shared or cloud-based environments that are not conducive to the deployment of agent-based application performance management solutions, transaction tagging or code changes.

Any organization considering the addition of alternative payment channels should equip IT operations and managed services teams with a tool that can measure how those applications perform in the eyes of the end customer — which is their end-to-end response time. IT and managed services teams will be able to work smarter and faster when it comes to isolating performance issues, diagnosing multi-party issues, and spotting underperforming payment application/card/transaction type combinations.

About Marc Borbas

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