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Why your visibility stops here: The case for a real-time BTM solution

August 24, 2011 by Marc Borbas — VP, Marketing, INETCO

ATM monitoring solutions are a good thing. But are they enough? Let’s face it, it’s getting harder to avert outages and incidents that impact key business performance within your ATM network infrastructure. 

When it comes to ATM network architectures, simple centralized systems no longer exist. You now have multiple ATMs, a number of on-premise and off-premise applications, more Web-based business processes to contend with, not to mention the distributed infrastructures that span half the globe. 

It is no surprise that these new complex enterprise environments have left more than one IT operations and applications support team treading water and wondering how they can manage what they can’t see.

End-customer expectations are also on the rise. Enhanced ATM fraud security and advanced service functionality such as account balance checking, bill payment and loyalty programs equate to higher volumes of transactions. Each transaction now touches a number of service applications, many of these located within virtual or cloud-based environments, and often belonging to third party software-as-a-service providers. 

The success of today’s ATM networks is dependent on seamless interoperability between all these various application hops and systems. There are a lot more opportunities for blind spots, and that means greater risk of performance issues going undetected for longer periods of time. To deal with this new level of complexity, IT operations and applications support teams require more than end-point or application-specific performance visibility. They require visibility into all the various application response times and data exchanges that happen along the entire transaction path.

Many traditional ATM monitoring solutions adopt the perspective of a single application’s performance profile, but visibility stops there. While there is no denying that many transactions begin and end at the ATM, the performance details of a payment transaction, as it touches the multiple on-premise and off-premise service applications and network infrastructures, is becoming too valuable to ignore. 

And this is why it is time to think about complementing your existing ATM monitoring tools with a real-time business transaction management (BTM) solution.

The thing about complementing your existing ATM monitoring tool with a good BTM tool is that it can potentially pay for itself with one outage. BTM tools can include key performance indicators such as:

• End-to-end transaction query and response times (includes call timings for both client side and back end authorization processes)
• Transaction anomalies such as high dollar volume, recurring card swipes and decline patterns
• Concurrent transaction rates
• Rates of approved, declined, reversed, failed and unsupported transactions
• Terminal IDs of ATM, POS, and other payment application devices

Gone are the frustrating hours spent trying to collect and piece together fragmented data from a variety of sources. Implementing BTM, as it already has been done with Customers ATM, will eliminate blind spots, improve the end-customer experience, and avert customer outages and incidents that impact key business performance within your ATM network infrastructure.

About Marc Borbas

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