Application and Infrastructure Performance Monitoring for a
private sector bank in India

We have worked with a new generation private sector bank with approximately 350 branches across 18 states and 2 union territories. It is a scheduled commercial bank regulated by the Reserve Bank of India. It is professionally managed and governed. Bank has contemporary technology and infrastructure including state of the art internet banking for personal as well as business banking customers.

Bank’s business segments are Retail, micro-SME, SME, mid-Corporate, Agriculture, Commodities, Government, Public Sector, Indian Banks, Co-operative Banks and Non Banking Finance Companies (NBFC). It has approximately 600,000 customers.

Adit Microsys implemented “Application Performance Monitoring Solution” and helped customer to find out the service slowdown with great accuracy.

This bank has been increasingly relying on IT to serve its customers efficiently. Information technology department of the bank is backbone to support their customers for online and phone banking, credit card and cheque services, and even in-bank deposit and withdrawal services are dependent on the Bank's IT infrastructure.

Bank's IT infrastructure has grown in scale and complexity over the years. Today, it includes hundreds of servers, Applications and network devices. The IT infrastructure must operate well to conduct bank’s business smoothly. Variety of platforms is being used by bank to operate this heterogeneous environment. it includes but not limited to Java, Finacle, .Net, Oracle, SQL, IIS, Apache, Tomcat and windows, Linux based operating system.

Failure or slowdown of any of the IT services leads to disruption in service to customers.

Bank's IT monitoring strategy had not evolved at the same pace as its IT infrastructure and applications. Their IT staff have relied on a network management solution provided by local vendor, for monitoring network devices and servers. Multiple vendor-provided management and administration tools were being used for each of the elements in the bank’s data center. In-house scripts were used to monitor application and system log files. There were basic checks in place to detect up/down status of servers and applications, but nothing more in-depth and comprehensive.

Because of the fragmented approach to monitoring, the Bank's IT operations team did not have centralized visibility into the entire IT infrastructure. Whenever an issue occurred, their domain experts had to do a lot of manual effort to find the cause of the issue and to rectify it. As a result, service downtime was high. Often, lack of unified visibility meant that the root cause of a problem would go unidentified and the problems were resolved by just restarting the servers or applications.

To modernize its IT monitoring, the Bank’s IT operations team was looking for a centralized remote monitoring solution that would serve as a single pane of glass for its IT infrastructure including network devices, servers, storage and applications.

We approached this Bank for a centralized remote monitoring system. We implemented eG Innovations in Bank’s datacenter on a virtual server provided by client. With server-client architecture of eG Innovations, we installed a very light weight agent in the critical application servers and database servers that can communicate to eG master server and send all the details and logs to the master server. Apart from discovery, with the excellent feature called “co-relation” of eG Innovations, we mapped different components which was responsible to serve an application to a single service and created network topology to identify the exact root cause of any problem before it impacts on the actual performance of an application.

Client is very impressed with eG Enterprise's broad technology coverage. Most of the key elements in data center - the application servers, databases, virtualization platform, storage devices and network devices is monitored out of the box. With eG Enterprise, client saw the opportunity to go from monitoring just networks and up/down status to monitoring applications in-depth and being able to detect and rectify problems quickly.

Within a few days of deployment of remote monitoring solution, their IT operations team was able to start monitoring their key application servers, databases and virtualization platforms. Standard network devices are also being monitored using SNMP. The ability to view the entire IT infrastructure responsible for their data center from one central console is the single biggest benefit to this bank. They are now not only able to monitor the individual tiers, but can also see dependency maps showing the different IT components supporting each of our business applications.