Bank Cuts Response Time by 30% With Lossless Visibility

This large regional financial institution is committed to customer service, which has been its competitive advantage for 60 years. Executives had the foresight to strengthen the bank’s online presence, resulting in roughly 10 million downloads and application updates for smartphones and tablets. Amid the bank’s digital transformation, IT began struggling to maintain service quality as customers did more of their banking from smartphones, tablets, and other remote points of service.

Organization

• A regional bank with 4,000 branches, 28,000 ATMs, and 30,000 points of service

Challenges

• Improve application response time and service quality

• Identify the cause of performance issues to prevent a recurrence

Solutions

• Hybrid network visibility platform built with Keysight’s virtual and cloud taps and Vision series network packet brokers (NPBs)

• New application performance management solution from leading IT management vendor

• Keysight Hawkeye proactive network  monitoring solution

Results

• Thirty percent reduction in response time for  a key application

• Twenty-five percent reduction in applicationrelated support cases

• Additional staff time available for proactive monitoring

Challenges

Maintaining application quality

Application quality and end-user satisfaction are central to the bank’s success. The bank’s systems development department is responsible for resolving issues with applications that affect service quality and end user transactions. The team noticed an increase in customer complaints involving service disruptions. Traditional performance monitoring and WAN optimization tools did not provide the insight necessary for the team to diagnose the underlying cause.

Diagnosing underlying performance issues

The systems development team was struggling to diagnose the underlying cause of application disruptions and slow performance. Frequently, issues the team had closed recurred and required additional investigation. The team found it difficult to objectively determine the effectiveness of application implementations in the production network even in situations where information was available from logs and web servers.

Ensuring monitoring systems scale with business

An initial assessment revealed that recent increases in traffic volume had overwhelmed the company’s monitoring tools. As a result, the tools were taking too long to process data and were dropping packets. Support managers suspected incorrect results were contributing to the recurrence of application disruptions.

Our challenge was to develop objective indicators to measure the quality of applications with more consistency and identify opportunities for improvement.

Solution

Enhanced network visibility

IT recognized that their increasing use of software-defined infrastructure and cloud resources was impacting their ability to see what was happening across their networks. While it was straightforward to tap traffic from the physical infrastructure, they had no comparable solution for accessing traffic on their virtual and cloud servers. Their monitoring solutions were not seeing all the relevant application traffic.

The team implemented visibility solutions from Keysight to eliminate the blind spots related to hybrid resources. They chose virtual and cloud taps and Keysight Vision One and Vision Edge NPBs to create a lossless visibility architecture that would provide their monitoring tools with packet data from across the organization.

Keysight’s visibility solutions did more than eliminate blind spots. They also used packet intelligence to sort and filter network traffic based on packet details while maintaining zero packet loss. This allowed the team to isolate traffic related to a specific application or specific type of user — such as those accessing an application from their smartphones.