Global Financial Services Leader

The company is a leading provider of post-trade financial services—the clearing and settlement activities that happen after a securities trade is complete. Customers include many of the world’s largest banks and broker/dealers.

Solution

– Alluvio NetProfiler
– Alluvio Portal
– Alluvio AppResponse
– Alluvio Flow Gateway
– Alluvio NetIM

Challenge

Network monitoring and troubleshooting when the business depends on it

When the network carries tens of millions of transactions daily, even minor slowdowns can have a major impact on the business. “Our customers and internal stakeholders need be confident that we are on top of network issues so we can remediate before users feel any impact,” says the vice president of infrastructure services.

As transaction volume grew and the company migrated more applications and data to a major public cloud, the infrastructure services team identified several areas for improvement. Teams needed better visibility into network and application performance and a way to map the complex infrastructure. The aging network-management solution had become expensive to support, required extensive customization, and was difficult to use. Solutions with overlapping features led to unnecessary costs.

As the old network-monitoring platform neared end of life, the company took the opportunity to rethink its approach to monitoring and troubleshooting network and application performance.

Solution

Riverbed Unified Network Performance Monitoring

Today the company achieves its goals withRiverbed® Unified Network Performance Monitoring(NPM) solutions. Some the company has used for years; others replaced the legacy third-party solution.

The heart of the solution isAlluvio NetProfiler, which uses flow data to monitor enterprise-wide network and application activity both in the data centre and the cloud.Alluvio AppResponseperforms continuous packet capture and analysis, storing packets for up to three days for swift troubleshooting. Alluvio AppResponse exports rich details about applications and response time to NetProfiler, supplementing the basic flow data.

When troubleshooting infrastructure issues, the IT team usesAlluvio NetIMto map application network paths—both on-premises and in the cloud. To model the impact of planned changes and diagram the network, the team uses Riverbed NetPlanner and NetAuditor. “Complete diagramming of our network helps us better see, understand, and respond to issues,” says the vice president of infrastructure services.

All intelligence from the various tools comes together in Riverbed Portal, the single source of truth for the Office of the CIO, front-line infrastructure teams, and others. “Some teams had certain information in the past, but our network engineers and help desk teams were flying blind,” explains the network tools architect. “Portal gives us much better visibility.”

Benefits

Faster troubleshooting, lower costs—and better insights

The company engaged a Riverbed partner to deploy the solutions. Productivity gains were practically immediate, thanks to out-of-the-box workflows and the intuitive interface. “Using the previous solution, it took weeks before staff could use even rudimentary functions,” says thenetwork tools architect. “We started using Riverbed NetProfiler in one hour.”

Improveduserexperiencefor internal users and customers

MTTR is now seven times faster for complex issues and 24 times faster for common issues. “Our ability to troubleshoot network problems increased substantially with the Riverbed Unified NPM platform,” says the network tools architect. “Proactive troubleshooting avoids the painful phone calls and attention that come from network problems.” Identifying the cause of application problems unrelated to the network is simpler because AppResponse saves up to three days of packet capture.

Lower costs

Replacing the old platform with Riverhead Unified NPM eliminated redundant products, significantly reducing support and licensing costs. The intuitive interface lowers labour costs because staff can work faster and more collaboratively. The company estimates savings from replacing redundant solutions with less expensive, more effective solutions will add up to $3-$4 million.

Insights for better planning

The IT team uses Riverbed’s Infrastructure Management solutions to see where applications live on the network, check each device’s configuration and operating system for compliance, and see which devices are nearing end of life. These insights simplify planning.

“Our relationship with Riverbed is about more than the network,” concludes the vice president of infrastructure services. “It’s a collaboration across all of our enterprise infrastructure.”

“Our ability to troubleshoot network problems increased substantially with Riverbed Unified NPM solutions. Proactive troubleshooting avoids the painful phone calls and attention that come from network problems”

Global Financial Services Company