Operation Monitoring: why its role is central in Finance
Operation Monitoring & Performance strategies allow you to collect key metrics relating to the performance of one or more systems to assess their health and possibly resolve problems in the shortest possible time.
Since the complexity of environments has increased exponentially in recent years, related monitoring must also take this into account, covering hybrid environments, containers and microservices, cloud-native applications, etc. There are, in particular, some economic segments that are undergoing a profound metamorphosis, driven by the digital transformation that has a radical impact on their traditional business models. This is the case, for example, of the Finance sector and of the services included in this area. Companies operating in the banking or insurance sector, in fact, need to offer top-quality features on their platforms for a quality customer experience. Operation Monitoring activities serve precisely to make sure this happens.
Areas of Operation Monitoring for Finance
In order to stay competitive in the new market scenarios, companies in the Finance world must preside over three key areas:
- customer experience
- innovation and development
- application performance
The customer experience, as anticipated, needs to be continuously optimized. Customers need to use the services wherever they are and with any device without problems due to slowdowns or, even worse, inaccessibility. Today, a few hours of unavailability of services are enough to determine the risk of abandonment by the user. Application development teams need to be able to focus on implementing features that accompany the business and not on solving problems. An advanced Operation Monitoring allows them to always have everything under control during production and before the final release. Applications that are unable to provide high performance generate direct and indirect maintenance costs because they reflect on customer disaffection. Operation Monitoring allows you to offer a real-time picture of the infrastructure and application park trends.
Ensuring a total view of all channels
In light of the above, a modern Operation Monitoring system aims to ensure a complete view of all the channels used by financial institutions in the relationship with their stakeholders. This vision includes the ability to monitor, analyze and optimize every interaction that occurs along the customer journey, with an immediate in-depth analysis ranging from performance, especially on mobile devices, to crash analytics. The outcome must flow into a series of summary information that includes the service levels and the availability of the systems, together with that of the main commercial transactions. To do this, it is necessary to carry out what is called Real User Monitoring (RUM), an analysis that is obtained through constant observation (observability) of the concrete user behavior. And since the stack of Finance actors today tends to be very articulated, between legacy applications and the use of microservices, observability must adapt to the dynamism of the environments to be monitored by adopting, among other things, artificial intelligence to achieve their purpose.
AIOps in Financial Services Operation Monitoring
In Finance, Operation Monitoring using artificial intelligence, the machine learning algorithms available with AIOps solutions (Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations) in particular, can count on a powerful tool not only for anomaly detection but also for predictive analysis and automatic remediation. Being able to shorten the average repair time or MTTR (Mean Time To Repair) is essential in any situation. However, if you think about the impact it may have for users unable to access their current account through their bank's app, you understand the importance of the MTTR value in the field of financial services. This does not mean the AIOps platforms will replace the Operation Monitoring tools, but that they will become part of an ecosystem in which the data collected will serve to give an increasingly rich point of view on the overall health of the services. For this reason, companies in the Finance sector will have to identify, rather than the single solution, the most suitable partner who can ensure the best response in terms of Operation Monitoring.
