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Monitoring transactions without a forklift

May 8, 2013 by Marc Borbas — VP, Marketing, INETCO

We know that banks care deeply about interactions (which engage customers), and transactions (which generate revenue). The problem is there are more and more places where these critical interactions and transactions can fail.

Given these facts, the value proposition around transaction-centric application performance monitoring within multi-channel retail banking environments is stronger than ever. It's quite common to hear banks that have adopted these solutions as a part of their IT monitoring strategy report positive results, including up to 25 percent reductions in failed consumer transactions, or a 65 percent to 75 percent faster understanding of where and why service delivery is failing.

So here's the question: With so many business expectations evolving around the consumer experience as a focal point, why has transaction-centric application performance monitoring not been adopted by all banks?

Talking to our prospects, customers and partners, I believe there are two major hurdles inhibiting the wide-spread adoption of transaction-centric application performance monitoring. One is lack of trust in vendor claims — profiling an end-to-end transaction in near real-time is a tough thing to do, and decoding a multi-protocol environment requires deep expertise in data communications and protocols that is difficult to find.

There has been a lot of skepticism about data integrity, and whether it is really possible to access end-to-end transaction data in one place, given today's infrastructure complexities such as multi-vendor application architectures, mobile and online applications, virtual data centers, third party software-as-a-service and the Cloud. The default solution for many banks has been to slowly and painfully piece fragmented data gathered together across multiple tools and silos to isolate the root cause of an issue affecting consumer transactions.

The other major hurdle is time and the lack of a forklift large enough to deploy a heavy application performance management solution — the amount of instrumentation, code changes and extra traffic loads involved in the deployment of most traditional performance management solutions is completely mind-boggling. In the past, taking at least 365 days to deploy an agent-based solution was not uncommon, and the hit on resource consumption was huge. And placing agents in environments the bank did not own? Ha. We all know how that goes over.

The good news is these hurdles have been overcome through modern network-based instrumentation and new spins on transaction management approaches. A new breed of application performance monitoring solutions now exists that has proven the ability to profile end-to-end transactions in real time.

Network-based solutions correlate multi-hop transactions in near real-time — without agents, code changes or extra traffic loads. They are easily deployed in less than a day, providing a "one stop" view for multiple IT silos and channel managers across ATM, POS, mobile, online banking, IVR and branch environments.

The bottom line? Improved service delivery and operational efficiency — made possible by technology innovation.

If you're are under pressure to keep up with evolving self-service applications and meet consumer expectations around "on-demand" accessibility, consistency and choice, it may be time to consider tracking your critical banking applications end-to-end with transaction monitoring

About Marc Borbas

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