Tag: synthetic monitoring

JDS is currently working with several businesses across Australia to implement our custom synthetic monitoring solution, Active Robot Monitoring—powered by Splunk. ARM is a simple and effective way of maintaining the highest quality customer experience with minimal cost. While other synthetic monitoring solutions operate on price-per-transaction model, ARM allows you to conduct as many transactions as you want using under the umbrella of your Splunk investment. We recently developed a Splunk ARM solution for one of the largest banks in Australia and are in the process of implementing it. Find out more about the problem presented, our proposed solution, and the expected results below.

The problem

A large Australian bank (‘the Bank’) needs to properly monitor the end-to-end activity of its core systems/applications. This is to ensure that the applications are available and performing as expected at all times. Downtime or poor performance, even for only a few minutes, could potentially result in great loss of revenue and reputation damage. While unscheduled downtime or performance degradation will inevitably occur at some point, the Bank wants to be notified immediately of any performance issues. They also want to identify the root cause of the problem easily, resolve the issue, and restore expected performance and availability as quickly as possible. To achieve this, the Bank approached JDS for a solution to monitor, help triage, and highlight error conditions and abnormal performance.

The solution

JDS proposed implementing the JDS Active Robot Monitoring (ARM) Splunk application. ARM is a JDS-developed Splunk application which utilises scripts written in a variety of languages (e.g. Selenium) with custom built Splunk dashboards. In this case, Selenium is used to emulate actual users interacting with the web application. These interactions or transactions will be used to determine if the application is available, whether a critical function of the application is working properly, and what the performance of the application is like. All that information will be recorded in Splunk and used for analysis.

Availability and performance metrics will be displayed in dashboards, which fulfils several purposes—namely providing management with a summary view of the status of applications and support personnel with more information to help identify the root cause of the problem efficiently. In this case, Selenium was chosen as it provides for complete customisations not available in other similar offerings in the synthetic monitoring segment, and when coupled with Splunk’s analytical and presentation capability, provides the best solution to address the Bank’s problem.

The expected results

With the implementation of the JDS ARM application at the Bank, availability, and performance of their core applications is expected to improve and remain at a higher standard. Downtime, if it occurs, will be quickly rectified as support personnel will be alerted immediately and have access to all the vital data required to do a root cause analysis of the problem quickly. Management will have a better understanding of the health of the application and will be able to assign valuable resources more effectively to work on it.

What can ARM do for your business?

Throughout the month of November 2017, JDS is open to registrations for a free on-site workshop at your business. We will discuss Active Robot Monitoring and how it could benefit your organisation specifically. To register for this exclusive opportunity,  please enter your information below and one of our account executives will contact you to set up a time to meet at your location.