Global Financial Firm Controls IT Operations Costs with Ironstream for Splunk on IBM Z

Ironstream for Splunk provided firm a successful ITOA solution

Banks and financial services firms have many unique challenges in this digital-mobile-global era, and choosing which to address first is an important skill for their IT leaders. Better control over a multiplicity of costly IT operations was the goal of this multinational financial services corporation. One job, for example, was using 30% more CPU time than was normal; the cause was unclear, and the impact was unacceptable.

The lack of understanding exactly “why” certain things cost so much and took so long to resolve had to be addressed to ensure they remained a leader in this hyper-competitive sector.

More broadly, the customer was spending too much money on additional capacity on demand; the mean time to problem resolution was too long; timely alerts to many problems were lacking; and there was insufficient correlation of significant events picked up by operational and application performance monitors in various business segments. Even more critically, there was no correlation between its IBM Z Platform and distributed systems.

IT operations analytics (ITOA) was the primary use case the company wanted addressed, and that included several capabilities to address their business needs:

• Getting real-time alerts from RMF III and Db2 database access threads
• Proactively monitoring statistical anomalies relating to IBM Z platform resource consumption
• Real-time tracking of transaction performance as transaction data moved through multiple stages from distributed to IBM Z platform systems
• Real-time alerting on IBM Z platform usage and contention issues in batch job performance
• Real-time monitoring of Db2 Stored procedures for excessive calls
• Identifying key areas for automation or consolidation

The solution began with researching the IT operations analytics (ITOA) marketplace and choosing the clear leader in this big data analytics platform sector serving the high-transaction financial services firms. The customer’s overall platform selection for IT monitoring and analytics, which brings together inputs from its distributed computing environment, was  Splunk® Enterprise. This platform was ingesting 40 terabytes of log data per day from hundreds of applications around the world.