Ensuring Transaction Connections with FactFinder
A world leader in payment transaction processing leverages high performing IT infrastructure to keep customers coming back. The company has invested heavily in physical infrastructure, virtualization, and the necessary tools to manage the infrastructure.
FactFinder monitors application and transaction
performance across physical and virtual systems
The Situation
To drive efficiencies, the company had a goal of virtualizing 70 to 80 percent of their infrastructure, but IT started receiving complaints of performance from end users – including complaints about virtualized infrastructure. A larger concern was that none of the performance tools already in place indicated that performance was bad. As a result, too many problems were found by end user complaints. To make matters worse, it took too long to fix problems, sometimes 2 days or even longer.
The company’s virtual infrastructure was essentially a black box to all the tools in place, creating a situation where major problems went undetected. Furthermore, there was no information to help figure out where the problems occurred, contributing to the 2+ day turnaround time for solving problems. They finally called BlueStripe for help.
Executive Summary
Company Profile
- Leader in Payment Transaction Processing looking to virtualize 70-80% of infrastructure
- Experiencing performance issues with virtualized infrastructure
- Current tools indicated no issues
- Problem resolution time took up to 2 days
The Challenge
- Quickly & accurate identify bottlenecks before users complained
- Isolate the location of the slow or unavailable component
- Reduce problem resolution time significantly
The Solution
- BlueStripe FactFinder installed across App System
- Identified components and process taking up the most time for specific apps and transactions
- Delivered true response times for every application regardless of technology or platform
- Reduced problem resolution time to less than one hour
The Approach
The first hour of any application outage or slow-down is critical, so the company focused on the ability to triage application problems. They installed BlueStripe’s FactFinder across their core applications for 24/7 monitoring that would alert them to bottlenecks before end users complained.
Now, when problems occur, FactFinder isolates the location of slow or unavailable components – allowing the company to get to the cause of problems extremely fast, even before end users are impacted.
The Findings
FactFinder immediately showed which components and processes were taking up the most time for specific applications and transactions. This allowed the team to understand the most critical points in their application systems by showing them application performance at each technology tier, hop by hop.
FactFinder delivered true response times for every application, regardless of technology or platform. Finally, the company had a view of true application performance across the infrastructure, regardless of the narrowly focused specialty tools already in place.
The Results
The company is migrating their applications to a virtual infrastructure with more confidence as they understand what the applications are doing, where transactions are going, and where those application transactions spend time. In addition, they have experienced:
- Reduction of problem solving time by 90%, from 2 days to less than an hour
- Visibility of tier-to-tier response times allowing accurate assignment of any problem
- Real-time visibility of changes across their physical and virtualized infrastructure
