When it comes to banking and financial services, we all depend on software as an invisible support powering mobile and online life. Bankdata develops dynamic new bank apps, creating customer-facing solutions that are fully integrated with core transaction services. But critical monitoring tools were unable to provide detailed application data, which prevented Bankdata from fine-tuning and monitoring applications which could ultimately affect the end-user experience.
From mobile apps to large-scale data engines, modern banking relies on a complex web of connected systems, software, and networks. To support innovation, banks turn to specialists such as Bankdata to provide development skills and capacity. Bankdata helps them bring new ideas and services to life, rapidly and reliably.
Each new application brings additional workload, such as requesting transaction data from multiple resources. In many cases, banks run their core transaction processes on IBM Z® enterprise servers, which also deliver the data to the new applications.
Frank Petersen, Lead IT Architect at Bankdata, remarks, “If an application runs more slowly than we expect, or fails for some reason, understanding the root causes enables us to resolve the issues more efficiently. Looking at the workload at the application level shows us what’s happening, but we lacked this kind of detailed monitoring data from our IBM Z environment.”
Processing fees rise as workload increases, so there is also direct financial value in tuning applications for optimal efficiency. Bankdata relies on an external partner to provide IT services and data center hosting, and inefficient workload causes additional costs to be passed on to the banks.
“If we could see which applications cause, for example, high volumes of database calls, we could focus on enhancing the software design,” says Petersen. “This would help to reduce software costs by cutting the transaction workload, improving application performance, and delivering a smoother, faster end-user experience.”
by enabling faster identification
by lowering transaction workload on IBM Z
Bankdata selected OMEGAMON® Data Provider (ODP), designed by Rocket Software, to deliver detailed application-level monitoring for the IBM Z platform.
Rocket Software is a trusted, strategic IBM partner, with a relationship that began more than 30 years ago. The partnership spans multiple IBM brands, solutions, and platforms, including IBM Z and Power Systems, and 19 of their employees have been recognized as 2023 IBM Champions, more than any other company in the world.
ODP (within the IBM Z Monitoring Suite) captures data from existing OMEGAMON solutions and makes it available to any standardized monitoring solution – in this case, Bankdata has selected the open-source Grafana dashboarding tool.
“We follow a fully agile DevOps approach, and our developers work on all platforms and operating systems,” says Petersen. “We realized that learning the intricacies of multiple monitoring applications was not realistic. Using OMEGAMON® Data Provider to enable Grafana to create dashboards gives us the ability to standardize and streamline our processes, and fits with our skill sets and strategy. Application-level data that was previously difficult for us to access is now presented by ODP using published APIs, available to developers using Grafana.”
By using ODP to measure application performance during development, developers can identify subtle changes in performance between new and prior releases of code. For example, there may be software design changes that for unexpected reasons provoke an upward workload trend. By discovering and addressing issues during the development process, Bankdata can avoid possible failure or cost increase in production operations. Resolving issues earlier in the software lifecycle also reduces development timelines and costs.
With application-level data about the performance of running code provided by ODP, Bankdata can investigate and understand performance at the earliest opportunity. Not only does ODP help Bankdata improve software quality and development productivity, it also helps bank clients reduce their transaction costs by optimizing workloads. In addition, enhanced development processes help the banks deliver outstanding user experience, both for consumers and corporate customers.
“By working with Rocket Software to deploy ODP, we now have the ability to monitor application performance in real time, from development to test to production,” says Petersen. “With the data provided by ODP we can be more proactive in fixing issues, reduce our development time, and ensure good quality code goes into production environments. This is the true DevOps spirit - that teams can see and correct problems before the customers experience, for instance, an outage in an application.”
He concludes, “OMEGAMON Data Provider opens up application performance data from Z to our development team, which enables us to streamline the DevOps workflow across all platforms. With this information, we can deliver solutions more rapidly to banks, help them run their applications as cost-effectively as possible, and provide an unparalleled customer experience.”
Based in Fredericia, Denmark, Bankdata provides software development services to banks and financial institutions. Employing around 900 people, Bankdata solutions are deployed by eight of the leading Danish banks, handle around 86 million daily transactions, and support approximately 1.6 million bank customers.
Rocket Software is a trusted, strategic IBM partner, with a relationship that began more than 30 years ago. The partnership spans multiple IBM brands, solutions, and platforms, including IBM Z and Power Systems, and 19 of their employees have been recognized as 2023 IBM Champions, more than any other company in the world.
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Produced in the United States of America, December 2023.
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