Major European Bank Improves Application Performance with nGeniusONE

Customer Profile

This major European bank has tens of thousands of employees who support nearly twenty million customers. With more than five thousand branch locations, in addition to online banking and mobile applications, the IT organization has been tasked with maintaining end-to-end visibility to deliver seamless and reliable services to employees and customers alike. This bank depends on its ability to ensure a positive end-user experience. Any service degradations could create dissatisfied customers, which might cause them to take their business elsewhere, hurting the bank’s bottom-line.

The Challenge

The bank’s stated mission is to fully satisfy the financial needs of its customers through a comprehensive range of products and outstanding service. This commitment to excellence meant that the bank’s vital network and applications must be reliable and free of degradations, in order for employees and customers to complete transactions in a timely manner at any of the bank’s thousands of remote branch locations.

The IT team faced considerable challenges when end-users began experiencing exceedingly slow web browsing to external websites from branch offices, even as internal web-based applications worked fine. This degradation was causing significant delays, which directly impacted daily bank operations in all branches. Customer and employee satisfaction was greatly jeopardized. To address the problem, IT needed global visibility into services, offices, and users across the wide area network.

Solution in Action

The bank’s IT team turned to NETSCOUT® to solve its network and application issues. The nGeniusONE Service Assurance platform and InfiniStreamNG appliances, which transforms wire data into Smart Data for proactive detection and troubleshooting, were deployed to show all tiers and dependencies of the bank’s critical applications and services via multiple instrumentation vantage points.

The nGeniusONE server was configured with customized dashboards to provide quick visibility into important banking applications, web services, and critical service enablers such as DNS. The nGeniusONE deployment was operationalized to provide insights into the networks, services, and locations instrumental to efficient communications from the branches, headquarters and data centers.

The NETSCOUT solution was immediately able to uncover the two chief problems plaguing the bank. In one case, access to web-based services had become very slow and the dashboard view of nGeniusONE showed high errors for DNS services from the branch offices. Security cameras operating across the thousands of branches were generating nearly 200,000 DNS errors per second. Leveraging nGeniusONE’s unique DNS Service Monitor, the IT staff focused on several branch offices’ DNS activity and discovered they were all attempting to access the security camera’s manufacturer, however they were resolving to the wrong DNS host – hence the errors. Once the address was corrected, web traffic response time performance returned to appropriate levels.

In another case involving slow response times for web-based applications, the IT staff uncovered antivirus software updates were overloading the proxy servers directing traffic to the internet links, increasing the latency for all other internet web applications. They were able to use this information to configure a different route for this traffic to eliminate the extreme slowdown in web services to users at the branches.

The Results

The NETSCOUT solution has proven instrumental in solving the network and applications issues faced by this European bank. IT is now enabled to monitor and troubleshoot application performance in order to ensure the availability of all critical applications and supporting infrastructure.

By uncovering as many as 200,000 DNS errors per second generated from the branch offices - that had previously gone undetected - the NETSCOUT solution has allowed the bank’s IT team to fix the problem. This Smart Data-powered solution has dramatically reduced Mean-Time-To-Repair (MTTR), allowing IT to isolate and resolve problems, thus improving the end-user experience for both employees and customers. In turn, by ensuring the best quality user experience, the bank is able to assure vitally important business operations.

In addition, the insights provided by NETSCOUT allow IT to right-size the bank’s infrastructure and more effectively forecast needed bandwidth and server capacity upgrades in the future.