How to Select a Performance Improvement Tool (PIT) for Banking and Financial Services (Banking & Finance Tips– #11-092316)

Because of the silos within Banking and Financial Services IT organizations, it is a rare Banking and Financial Services that looks at the big picture when considering their needs for PIT tools. Instead, they select a patchwork of solutions to monitor servers, storage, SAN, and applications separately.

They might even slice and dice their tools further by technology brand. By taking a broad view and assessing the whole Banking and Financial Services’ needs.

Therefore, before purchasing a PIT tool, think broadly about whether it can provide value for day-to-day maintenance and management, capacity and infrastructure planning, cloud and data center migration analysis, planning for mergers, acquisitions, and other strategic initiatives. Below are several ways you might want to use PIT tools along with features to consider.

Everyday Maintenance and Management and Must-Haves for All Uses

The physicians’ mantra “First, do not harm” applies to PIT tools—they must not impair performance or add to workloads. So look for PIT tools that selectively monitor the IT environment. Because un-selective monitoring eats up capacity, it causes a sluggish response similar to that of a computer that is chugging through a full virus scan.

Instead, your tool should work efficiently in the background, prioritizing the issues most likely to affect performance. In addition, the tool should not create more work for IT staffers. Since it is burdensome to manage one more application, and the associated data and hardware, it is best to look for a cloud-based solution that you do not have to maintain.

In addition, because technology is interconnected with one part influencing how the next operates, you need to have a unified vision across your whole infrastructure that furnishes applications to end users. This requires a solution that monitors the configuration, capacity, and performance of all brands of servers, storage, SAN, and applications. It needs to provide a picture of the elements of your global IT environment whether on-premises, hybrid or in the cloud. Only such a broad solution enables you to correlate performance with changes anywhere in your infrastructure and to diagnose problems. Another benefit is that it is easier to learn and manage one cohesive tool than multiple tools.

Not only do you need to monitor everything, but also you need to do so all the time. Around-the-clock surveillance and data collection enables you to spot performance trends and aberrations quickly. The longer you can keep your data, the better your ability to establish reasonable performance thresholds, and foretell and avert potential disasters. Your historical data should include a high degree of granularity—snapshots every five minutes or so. If one or two statistical outliers skew your data, this enables you to see beyond the averages that misrepresent reality.

Finally, while enterprise-wide tools give you a bird’s-eye view of your infrastructure, they often do not provide the ability to drill deeply enough to solve problems. Your solutions must allow you to home in on root causes of problems, enabling you to resolve issues before they disrupt the user experience or increase costs. Ideally, the tool should present this information in a visually appealing dashboard that presents the right data, allowing you to gain insights rapidly.

Address Strategic IT Infrastructure Issues

To address strategic issues that affect overall costs and the user experience, you will once again need a PIT tool that provides a comprehensive, granular, around-the-clock vision and allows you to dig deeply to answer questions. It should also enable you to tag and group technology assets, creating virtual environments where you can learn about their requirements and performance. Ideally, you should be able to perform the analyses that form the foundation for the planning process within your tool rather than creating complex spreadsheets and exporting data.

Planning to Maximize Performance

A PIT tool that meets the criteria above allows you to look back over a couple of years of data to identify the trends and spikes in utilization, capacity, and operation, while is the foundation on which to build a technology plan that aligns with future needs, you also have to determine how the metrics for each component in your infrastructure correlate with the end-user experience.

IT leaders have traditionally assumed a one-to-one relationship between employee or sales growth and technology requirements. Since such guestimates are rarely accurate, they can lead to a misalignment of capacity and needs. The result is either over-spending or customer dissatisfaction. With the right data and analytics at your fingertips, however, you may discover that a heavy workload causes performance erosion even when 50 percent of capacity is still available. Such information along with knowledge of future business requirements and growth patterns empowers you to adjust capacity requirements, creating a robust IT infrastructure plan that will keep users happy while minimizing costs.

Another wrinkle in the planning process is the reality that change is constant in technology. For instance, you might intend to make upgrades that could significantly influence your infrastructure requirements. If so, you need a way to find answers to questions about how upgrades will shape performance.

Perhaps, for example, your business executes 10,000 transactions a second with a disc response time of one millisecond. To improve the user experience, you want to reduce response time 100 microseconds. Because it can increase response times by 90%, you are preparing to upgrade to flash storage. However, you want to know how the boost in performance will alter your customer’s experience—the transaction time. To answer such questions, make sure your PIT enables you to adjust your I/O and other variables to ascertain their impact.

Cloud Migration

Before following the crowd on the cloud migration path, IT leaders must assess the costs and benefits for their particular situation. To do so, first identify small technology groupings that support low-risk applications, generally those not related to operations. This requires a monitoring tool that allows you to tag and virtually group technology assets to ascertain their requirements and performance. Rather than assuming, for example, that you are at 100 percent utilization, this process allows you to provide potential vendors with your actual requirements and negotiate based on facts.

If you find two suppliers that appear to meet your cost and performance criteria, ask them both for a 30-day trial and split or duplicate your test group. You will need a vendor-agnostic, cloud-based PIT tool to monitor performance at each vendor. Because the cloud is dynamic, especially in multi-tenanted situations, continue monitoring performance after you have signed on the dotted line. You do not want

Your users’ experience to decline just because your cloud provider is acquiring new customers.

Data Center Migration

You cannot project the future without a full understanding of your existing storage and server assets and their capacity and utilization. Therefore, for data center migration planning, you will again need a PIT tool that allows you to create and view virtual technology groupings. With this capability, as well as historical data, you can ask the critical questions to create an informed data migration plan. Would we have enough capacity if we consolidated these data centers? What could we eliminate?

Mergers, Acquisitions, and Divestitures

If your company is planning an acquisition, you are likely concerned about whether you have the capacity to absorb the new organization’s technology needs into your infrastructure, or you need to buy new assets. For mergers, you must determine how to consolidate assets most effectively. Lastly, for divestitures, you want to know if you can afford to lose the IT assets associated with the business entity you are severing from your corporation.

In each situation, you need a detailed history of your IT infrastructure metrics and the ability to virtually group assets you will be absorbing or divesting. This information will enable you to understand the technology you plan to buy or sell along with their utilization, capacity, and performance. Without creating a sophisticated analysis from scratch or enlisting the assistance of a consultant, you will be able to look at different scenarios quickly to determine the optimal approach.

Based on how you plan to use the PIT tool and other resource constraints, consider the following questions when evaluating a purchase:

Resource Requirements

• Does the PIT tool require a full time employee to run it?

• Will the IMP tool cause any performance or capability problems due to excessive monitoring?

• Comprehensive Oversight (broad and deep)

• Is the PIT tool inclusive of servers, storage, SAN, and applications?

• Does the PIT tool allow you to monitor multiple brands?

• Does it monitor the environment 24/7/365?

• Does it offer a high degree of granularity to avoid skewed data?

• Are you able to keep historical data as long as you like?

• Can you drill deeply to determine root causes?

• Can you monitor cloud, hybrid, and on-premises environments?

Ease of Use

• Does it enable you to set thresholds for easy monitoring and prevention of business disruptions?

• Does it include visually appealing dashboards that provide key insights at-a-glance?

• Do the dashboards distill the most critical information? Does the company offer services to support you?

Data Precision

• Is the data granular enough that you can avoid skewed data that can mislead you?

Advanced Analytics for Planning

• Can you tag and group assets from part of your IT environment virtually for analyses?

• Can you execute “what if?” scenarios without exporting data to a spreadsheet?