Maximising infrastructure performance with analytics

“Foglight quickly alerts us of any problems, enabling us to fix them before our users or customers are affected. This ensures our customer service levels are maintained, which helps protect our business”
-Chris D'Costa, Head of IT Services and Support, ADCB

With 45 branches across the United Arab Emirates (UAE), as well as two branches in India, Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank (ADCB) is one of the UAE's largest banks. Formed in 1985, ADCB began a radical programme in 2003, designed to make itself the foremost financial institution in the UAE and the wider Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) region. The key pillars of this regeneration provide a continuous commitment to serving customers through every tool available. This includes innovative use of technology, and continuous investment in the skills and knowledge of all people at ADCB.

In line with this programme, the bank offers around-the-clock customer service through various channels such as call centres, internet portals, SMS, ATMs and branch locations. Quest Software helped ADCB meet the growing demands placed on its IT department to support these services, by improving the performance management of its underlying Oracle-based systems.

The Challenge
Prior to leveraging Quest's solutions, ADCB's customers would occasionally experience a timeout when using one of the bank's 120 ATMs. As a result, customers were unable to complete their cash withdrawal transactions. Although a second attempt would prove successful and this glitch occurred only 30 to 40 times during 25,000 daily transactions, ADCB was not content with this level of service. Despite no complaints from customers, the bank was determined to reduce the number of timeouts.

The cause of the ATM timeouts was related to the performance of ADCB's Oracle database environment, and the requirement for real-time read/write reporting. Running reports against the production environment occasionally resulted in slow ATM transactions and the timeouts. In order to overcome this performance issue, ADCB needed to replicate its Oracle database to provide a separate real-time reporting environment.

When the bank upgraded to Oracle version 9i, it found itself without a performance monitoring and tuning tool. Thus, ADCB could only react to performance problems rather than prevent them. It needed a database monitoring solution to diagnose problems proactively, resolve them quickly, and minimize their impact on both customers and employees.

Critical Need:
A solution to improve the performance of the Oracle environment through replication, diagnosis and monitoring

The Quest Solution
In its search for a suitable solution, ADCB found that Quest's Foglight® for Oracle and Spotlight® on Oracle had the strongest monitoring capabilities compared to other products on the market. And since SharePlex® also met ADCB's database replication requirements, the bank selected a robust set of solutions from Quest. Another factor in its decision to choose these solutions was that ADCB found the staff at Quest to be both helpful and knowledgeable and a good relationship had been built during the selection process.

Foglight monitors each component of the technology stack in real-time to identify potential problems before performance suffers. It also highlights trends and tunes applications to better accommodate peak periods of system activity, and provides management of service levels for Oracle database environments.

Spotlight on Oracle is a real-time diagnostics and issue resolution product. It enables administrators to anticipate and correct availability and performance issues across the Oracle environment. Spotlight supports multiple operating systems and other database platforms including SQL Server, DB2 and Sybase.

SharePlex for Oracle provides fault-tolerant replication for the Oracle database. It delivers a near real-time copy of the database for reporting, higher availability needs, disaster recovery, application integration, and planned or unplanned outages. The Quest solution was implemented in October 2006.

The Bottom Line
Foglight enables ADCB to resolve issues before they impact the stakeholders, resolving problems up to 92 percent faster than before. "Thanks to Foglight, it takes about five minutes to solve a problem now instead of 30 to 60 minutes, helping to improve customer service levels," explained Iqbal Mohammed, chief of systems and database administration, ADCB. "Also, Foglight alerts us of issues, such as when our storage levels exceed 80 percent, which saves us nearly three days per month in maintenance time."

Additionally, Foglight has enabled ADCB to use its resources more effectively and has reduced its overtime expenditure. "The information provided by Foglight is so detailed that we can immediately identify the right resource to resolve the problem, rather than having to involve a whole team of people," added Mohammed. "Our IT staff experience less anxiety as we are no longer required to solve issues during weekends and holidays."

Spotlight on Oracle has also reduced the amount of time to identify issues in this environment by 97 percent. "Spotlight helps us diagnose problems much faster," stated Mohammad. "Previously, it took as at least 30 minutes, but now we can do it in under a minute."

ADCB's use of SharePlex has dramatically reduced the number of ATM timeouts, enabling the introduction of a new SMS service to send banking information to customers on their mobile phones. "SharePlex's replication capabilities have facilitated a separate and real-time reporting environment with high performance levels, reducing the level of ATM timeouts by over 85 percent down to only four or five per day," stated Mohammad. "The improvement to performance has enabled us to implement our new SMS service, ensuring the bank keeps abreast of its competitors."

Results

• Corrected performance issues before customers were impacted
• Resolved application problems 92% faster than before implementation
• Saved up to three days per month in staff time through proactive performance management
• Contributed to more effective resource utilisation
• Delivered cost savings through reduced overtime payments
• Reduced time to diagnose database problems by 97%
• Reduced ATM timeout levels by 85%
• Eased the introduction of the SMS (mobile phone) service to customers

About Quest Software
Now more than ever, organizations need to work smart and improve efficiency. Quest Software creates and supports great systems management products-helping our customers solve everyday IT challenges easier and faster.

Visit www.quest.com/BM-ME for more information.

Foglight, SharePlex and Spotlight are registered trademarks of Quest Software, Inc. in the U.S.A and certain other countries. All other trademarks and registered trademarks are property of their respective owners.