Customer case study: Getting ROI from monitoring technology
With many financial services organisations facing IT budget cuts over the next few months, getting return on investment (ROI) for technology solutions is critical. There are two standout issues they face today: How can they reduce expensive downtime while tightening the purse strings?
Monitoring and ROI
A major southern hemisphere banking and financial services institution found a solution that had a welcome ROI: Geneos. The bank uses Geneos to monitor all the production environments for its online foreign exchange trading systems. If any of its systems were to go down, the result could be very costly.
Jacques Viljoen, Digital Trading Platforms Specialist at the bank, said: “…In the industry that we're working in, if the systems that are being monitored by this solution are all down, we could potentially look at losing a million SA rands an hour. That's the potential loss we are working with.”
Monitoring critical services
The bank chose Geneos around seven years ago to monitor in-house applications, mostly Java or Java-hosted apps, and it also monitors IBM MQ and Apache instances, some AWS components and Tomcat components, as well as FIX Trading or FIX Protocol. “One of the benefits is to have 24/7 automated monitoring of our most critical services,” said Jacques. “In general, it has drastically increased the visibility of our estate. It has definitely improved our response times to issues. We can proactively detect issues and prevent outages as well.”
Geneos’ lightweight data collection places almost no strain on an organisation’s servers and is very good at predicting and preventing IT failures. It is also highly customisable. Jacques said that the flexibility of the product is the most valuable for the bank: “If you put your mind to it and think of something you could do, there's a good possibility you can get it integrated within the console, if it's not readily available. The simplicity or ease of customisation has been valuable.”
Stability, scalability and support
The bank was impressed with the stability of Geneos, as well as its scalability and customer support.
“Its stability is very impressive. It's very solid… [and] it is definitely scalable. Five or six different departments within our organisation are using this monitoring solution. We've got AWS, and geographically, we have systems in South Africa, and we've also got a few in the UK. Overall, there are about 20 to 30 users of this solution.”
With regards to ITRS customer support, Jacques said: “… it is quite soothing to know that there is someone who knows more than you if you really get stuck. We haven't come across a scenario where they couldn't help us.” The bank plans to increase its usage of Geneos and there is a “constant drive to improve the monitoring and add new scenarios that we haven't thought about or didn't cover…”
“We have plans to increase its usage. It's currently the only monitoring solution on our slate. With the thoughts of going to AWS, et cetera, this is always part of our journey,” he added. Meanwhile, the ROI is extremely valuable: “That in itself speaks volumes versus the licensing cost we need to pay for this a year. That just gives an idea. If we don't have this monitoring in place and we lose the systems per se, we could lose what we pay now for licensing probably in about an hour. So, there is definitely value.”
