A few milliseconds can make a world of difference in a trading environment
With information sprawled across an array of solutions - third-party vendors, stock market tickers and so on - it was critical to this financial services company that all of these content feeds performed at optimal levels. The company used a tool called MTV to monitor the availability and suitability of each information source and check that it was completed promptly and correctly. But there were still gaps in the information that told them if their critical business application was functioning properly or if pending issues needed to be addressed.
The team, which included the manager for monitoring and control, the lead monitoring engineer and the vendor manager began looking for a solution that could tie all of the data together to give them a single, unified view of the environment supporting their trading application. Could one tool collect, aggregate, interpret and report simultaneously within a single dashboard?
A unified topology to detects and flags performance anomalies
The company originally piloted Dynatrace, but found Dynatrace unable to meet its customization requirements. The team then turned to StackState. StackState's topology-powered observability platform was able to readily merge all the existing, siloed topology data from tools such as CMDBs, Puppet, Jenkins and Kubernetes into a real-time, unified topology.
From the start, StackState demonstrated value by integrating several of the company's existing tools and services - Nagios, ServiceNow CMDB, MTV and the backend engine Cronacle - into a custom dashboard. The next step was adding in a MuleSoft API and an Azure Cloud subscription. But delivering end-to-end visibility into the company's stack was just the beginning.
Because StackState also understands what changed in the environment and when, it could immediately flag significant performance anomalies - important, because not all of the company's data sources were being monitored regularly.
Time-traveling: Going back to the exact moment an incident was triggered
Identifying these blind spots helped explain the slow response time for solving previous incidents - response teams were missing critical information. Further, previous integrations had led to some data being misaligned, misnamed and misclassified - a damaging state of affairs for any company, but more so for one whose business relies on infinitesimal data updates. Better yet, StackState gave the team the power to time travel, so they can go back to the exact moment when an incident was triggered and retrieve the status of any component in the IT stack, helping to deterministically pinpoint root cause and speed resolution times.
A winning outcome: Immediately seeing the impact of change
Ultimately, however, it was StackState's unified view that provided the biggest boost to the company. From monitoring and control to IT delivery to the different business teams, each stakeholder can now see the impact of a single change on their own customized dashboard in a language they understand. Consequently, like an orchestra playing the same tune on a diverse array of instruments, the entire organization now works together in new and dynamic ways, producing harmonious results for their investors.
