Industry: Financial services
Mean time to detect (MTTD), compared to hours previously
enhancement in customer experience
application visibility
As a leading non-bank mortgage service, the organization continually strives to optimize its solutions to deliver seamless digital experiences for its customers, clients, and investors. In its first few years, the company took a traditional on-premises approach towards its IT stack. As the need to expand digital services and accelerate innovation grew, the organization began to migrate towards a microservices and containerized architecture, in an on-premises private cloud. However, this transition introduced complexity across its IT environment and required a holistic, consolidated solution that could monitor across all technologies, give real-time insights, and cut resolution times.
"These applications are crucial for our end users for loan servicing. We were initially using AppDynamics for monitoring these applications. However, to maximize the value of our private cloud and to accelerate digital innovation, we needed a vendor who could offer tighter integrations, better on-time support, and end-to-end visibility from a single console," says the senior engineering manager.
"Seeking a more comprehensive observability solution, we opted to switch from AppDynamics to ManageEngine Applications Manager, and this move has proven to be a perfect fit for our requirements. — Senior engineering manager
After deciding to retire AppDynamics, the organization's IT team evaluated Dynatrace and Datadog. When those solutions failed to meet their requirements, the team turned to ManageEngine. "We have used ManageEngine products like ServiceDesk Plus, Analytics Plus, ADManager, etcetera in the past, and were elated with the results and support we received. This is what drove us to try Applications Manager," says the senior engineering manager.
Within weeks of evaluation, the team identified Applications Manager as a perfect fit for its requirements, as it offered real-time, contextual insight across the full stack—from infrastructure performance to end-user experience.
"Thanks to the product's application performance monitoring functionality (APM Insight), our IT team has been able to improve its mean time to identify and resolve issues. APM Insight helps us gain code-level visibility and provides exhaustive details on the back-end transactions, which makes it easier to identify and diagnose elements that are slowing the process. It also provide precise answers to questions raised around errors in real time," says the senior engineering manager.
"When it comes to APM Insight, the service map has to be one of our favorite features. It gives us a clear overview of how the components are connected, and helps assess the impact of performance issues—both upstream and downstream." — Senior engineering manager
Using the product has improved the team's efficiency and has enabled it to resolve issues in a shorter span of time. Before Applications Manager, much of the IT team's time was consumed by manual troubleshooting and reactive problem chasing. One incident required scouring multiple tools before clearing false alerts and taking action. Now, the IT team can prioritize alerts and automate corrective tasks, enabling them to focus on what matters the most: driving innovation for customers and accelerating the organization's digital transformation strategy.
Here are some of the key benefits the organization achieved after implementing Applications Manager.
Real-time insights: The IT team's primary responsibility includes ensuring on-time and high performance of applications that deal with loan processing and mortgage services. With Applications Manager's easy to navigate and unified UI, the team is now able to receive real-time insights into the performance of its heterogeneous application stack and ensure the critical ones are up and running.
Auto discovery and reduced alert noise: The product's automatic discovery and dependency mapping feature helps the team automatically discover all the components and dependencies across their entire IT stack, and continuously monitor its environment to detect any changes. Apart from this, the product's AI-powered smart alerts help eliminate false positives which has relieved the IT team of the tedious task of sifting through multiple alerts to piece together and understand what exactly is happening.
Better customer experiences: With Applications Manager, the IT team is able to proactively identify issues before customers are impacted. The team uses synthetic monitoring to identify the root cause of issues related to any external parties, track website performance across geographies, and real user monitoring to understand real-time end-user behavior. These valuable insights help reduce the amount of time the teams spend manually troubleshooting. As a result, the IT team is able to prioritize tasks that enhance service delivery for customers.
It allows us to track crucial metrics such as response times, resource utilization, error rates, and transaction performance. The real-time monitoring alerts promptly notify us of any issues or anomalies, enabling us to take immediate action.
Reviewer Role: Research and Development
Tech Support Manager, Lexmark