For Starling Bank, keeping IT systems up and running is core to doing business. The digital-first bank, which operates entirely online and has four million customer accounts, offers access to personal, business, joint and multi-currency accounts from a single application. Any downtime is costly—in time, money and customers.
As a fast-growing organization in the highly regulated, fiercely competitive financial services industry, the bank must be able detect and resolve issues across its IT environment quickly and efficiently. To that end, in 2018, the bank sought a way to trace requests—such as credit card requests from new customers—from start to finish. If a problem occurred, the bank wanted to be able to rapidly identify the original request, trace it through the system, pinpoint the issue and fix it.
Starling Bank chose IBM® Instana® Observability not only for its tracing capabilities, but also with an eye toward tapping into its robust set of additional features in the future. The solution provides incident prevention with automated full-stack visibility, one-second data granularity and three-second notification of errors. It’s ease of use speeds up innovation by empowering engineers and others throughout the company to view, build and debug their own products.
During the implementation, which took a couple of months, the Starling Bank and IBM teams set up the solution to trace activity across the company’s multi-tenant environment, which includes 2,000 container pods spread over six Kubernetes clusters, as well as 800 services.
With the solution successfully in place, the bank’s users are seeing the benefits. “We understand how difficult it is to have this type of high-speed, high-fidelity data available quickly,” says Chris Skaaning, Technical Lead, Starling Bank. “It is a true value add. And the solution has been very helpful in pinpointing where things are broken when we have high request error rates. One engineer recently said he was blown away by the detail in the trace diagrams.”
The bank is now starting to explore other solution features. “We brought in Instana purely for tracing, but I use it to see our Kubernetes infrastructure when new deployments have gone out. It’s much easier than logging into multiple clusters to look at infrastructure components and command lines,” concludes Skaaning.
Headquartered in London, England, Starling Bank (link resides outside of ibm.com) is a privately held, digital-first bank. It was founded in 2014 and currently has four million customers and more than 3,000 employees.
Legal
© Copyright IBM Corporation 2023. IBM Corporation, New Orchard Road, Armonk, NY 10504
Produced in United States of America, August 2023.
IBM, the IBM logo, and Instana are trademarks or registered trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation, in the United States and/or other countries. Other product and service names might be trademarks of IBM or other companies. A current list of IBM trademarks is available on ibm.com/legal/copyright-trademark.
This document is current as of the initial date of publication and may be changed by IBM at any time. Not all offerings are available in every country in which IBM operates.
All client examples cited or described are presented as illustrations of the manner in which some clients have used IBM products and the results they may have achieved. Actual environmental costs and performance characteristics will vary depending on individual client configurations and conditions. Generally expected results cannot be provided as each client's results will depend entirely on the client's systems and services ordered. THE INFORMATION IN THIS DOCUMENT IS PROVIDED "AS IS" WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING WITHOUT ANY WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND ANY WARRANTY OR CONDITION OF NON-INFRINGEMENT. IBM products are warranted according to the terms and conditions of the agreements under which they are provided.