ignio increases business resilience for a large European bank through optimized automation

This customer has a critical role as they act as the financial backbone for many of its end-customers. The customer’s main challenge arose due to the autonomy of various IT teams (called ‘tribes’) in the organization. This created a complex environment comprising over 7000 IT infrastructure systems and 300 business-critical applications. Due to this compounded structure, each tribe was primarily reacting to the IT-induced business disruptions and lacked any proactive processes for addressing issues such as preventing job delays, processing critical batch jobs, and predicting failures causing monetary losses. Additionally, their automation index was low, which added to the burden of manual and repetitive tasks. Finally, without any systems being in place to monitor the health of business processes, the fatigue for the IT teams increased.

The Challenge:

The customer was using Stripe as their electronic billing system and repeated disruptions in this system was causing a major failure at the business level, leading to a loss of potential revenues. Also, it was later established that many important services would unexpectedly fail due to either high workload, but there was no feasible way to preempt these failures. Although their monitoring tool, Dynatrace would provide indications of these services failing, it could not resolve the issue itself, resulting in requirement of extensive human intervention for troubleshooting, which led to business disruptions impacting their top-line.

Solution:

The customer chose Digitate to provide intelligent automation capabilities and proactively resolve IT issues in their e-commerce business process. Digitate leveraged ignio AIOps, our flagship product to perform automated health checks, detect issues and take self-healing actions to mitigate issues before they impact end users and business processes. ignio has industry-leading out of-the box automation capabilities with a library comprising 10k+ automation use cases that was leveraged for meeting requirements of various customers. ignio was also integrated with different existing systems such as ServiceNow and Dynatrace to enable the event driven automation. Some of the use cases covered by ignio includes:

• Robust business performance – By implementing daily health checks and proactive monitoring of metrics such as CPU, memory, disk utilization, the IT infrastructure is maintained in the threshold limits, thus enabling superior support for the business.
• Enhanced employee efficiency – 50+ use cases were implemented for the automation of service requests that sped up the process of delivery of service requests and reduced the burden of performing repetitive manual tasks, thus improving employee efficiency significantly.
• Prevented failure of critical services –Whereas the customer’s existing monitoring tools spurred unsuppressed alerts for service failures that added to the noise for the IT teams, ignio timely delivered critical notifications to the stakeholders and remediated these issues instantly through self-healing actions.

The Challenge:

SEPA is the main platform on which financial transactions such as invoice pay-outs are by the customer. Its robustness is imperative to the smooth functioning of this business as the customer being one of the largest financial institutions in Europe.

The scale at which this platform is used represents its importance in the business. It has over 4000 batch jobs running every month. Any instance of failure of a critical batch job impacted its ability to fulfil a financial transaction on time and breached the SLA. This also had cascading effects on other inter-dependent application bringing the system to a moot. Eventually, this resulted in loss of the end-customer’s trust and loyalty to the institution.

Solution:

ignio AI.Workload Management was selected by the customer to identify the critical batch jobs that were failing regularly. The customer discovered that over 250 critical batch jobs were failing every month in this system. Typically, over 30 minutes of manual effort was required to sort the issues culminating from such failures.

Using ignio, these critical batch jobs were identified by historical data patterns. It also helped the customer understand the inter connections that were impacted due to the failure of the critical bad jobs. Leveraging this visibility enabled them to predict which related jobs would fail next and which other systems or services could get impacted.

ignio integrated with their mailbox to deliver alerts on missed SLAs, making this process proactive. In this way, they were able to successfully combat the effect of job failures before it impacted the users.

Overall, ignio helped the customer reduce the MTTR for SEPA payments platform significantly. It enabled end-to-end prediction of 250+ critical SEPA batch jobs by integrating with Control-M, a batch management tool.

• USD 1.6 million – Potential revenue loss eliminated
• 11+ Different areas of work targeted, making the system cross-functional
• 60+ hours Manual effort saved annually
• 90% Automation index increased