INETCO Insight® Product Overview — Transforming Raw Data into Complete Business Transactions

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2 | INETCO Insight Product Overview — Transforming Raw Data into Complete Business Transactions

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Whitepaper overviewThe focus of IT operations teams is shifting from resource consumption to service quality and the end user experience. But identifying which application or infrastructure components are responsible for poor service quality or failed business process delivery is a tough thing to do in today’s complex, diverse and fast-changing enterprise environments. As applications become more distributed, IT operations teams are turning to new tools that can help with cross-team collaboration, faster problem isolation and obtaining end-to-end visibility into services and business process delivery.

APM operations tools such as INETCO Insight® are a new kind of application performance monitoring software for IT operations who need a better way to identify application or infrastructure bottlenecks and restore service levels faster.

This Whitepaper will answer questions such as:

●● What is driving a shift in focus for IT operations teams?

●● What are some of the challenging scenarios these teams face when it comes to identifying application or infrastructure components responsible for poor service quality and failed business process delivery?

●● How are APM tools evolving as enterprise environments continue to change and IT operations teams become more application- and end user- focused?

●● How does INETCO Insight help IT operations teams managing today’s complex, diverse and fast-changing enterprise environments?

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A new focus for IT operations IT operations teams are increasingly being held accountable for application performance—not just the health of the underlying infrastructure components. It used to be enough for IT operations teams to focus on infrastructure and critical devices, using resource utilization as the key performance metric. Although most companies still rely on infrastructure monitoring capabilities to underpin information and communications technology delivery, where they derive their true business value has shifted.

From a business value perspective, companies are now interested in seeing, in real time, service quality and how business processes are being delivered. This means today’s IT operations teams rely on cross-team collaboration and fast access to a wider range of infrastructure and application performance data than ever before. They still measure how resources are consumed, but this is now considered commodity data. These teams are now focused on analyzing application transaction response times, monitoring end-to-end service quality and business process delivery, and understanding what the end user is experiencing.

“Organizations that have capabilities for end-to-end views into application transactions are able to manage three times more users per help-desk FTE as compared to others.” BOJAN SIMIC, TRAC RESEARCH

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Adapting to “new world” enterprise environmentsThe complexity, diversity and fast-changing nature of today’s “new world” enterprise environments present many challenging scenarios when it comes to identifying which application or infrastructure components are responsible for poor service quality or failed business process delivery. As applications become more distributed, many IT operations teams are exploring new tools to manage:

●● The growing complexity of distributed or multi-tier applications brought on by the move towards multi-channel, adoption of private or public Cloud environments, and an increasing number of third party services.

●● The diversity within the application “ecology” which in many cases is a mixture of custom-built applications, legacy apps, IaaS/PaaS/SaaS, and emerging mobile, social and location-based applications.

●● The speed of change and development brought on by increasing customer demands, a need to connect all the diverse components described above, and a shift towards Agile Software Development methodologies.

●● The unprecedented volumes of Big Data that make it time-consuming and expensive to access relevant information in a timely manner.

To detect, diagnose and report on performance issues within “new world” enterprise environments, IT operations teams are turning to application performance monitoring (APM) solutions that are transaction response time-centric and provide end-to-end monitoring across IT infrastructure and application platforms.

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The evolution of Application Performance Monitoring (APM) — From development to IT operations toolAPM development tools, such as code profiles, transaction tracers, and debug log analyzers, were traditionally developed to perform deep-dive analysis and monitor code quality and optimization. They are used by application support teams and developers that want to “instrument” or “decorate” their code in order to follow their executed code all the way across an application.  Quite often, these are specific to a particular environment such as Java or .Net. In terms of cost and complexity, most IT organizations cannot afford to deploy these products for every application. These deep-dive tools are intended to focus on just a few of the most important applications in the overall application portfolio.

The functionality and typical use case scenarios of APM tools are evolving as enterprise environments continue to change and IT operations teams become more application—and end user—focused. This is driving development of next-generation application performance monitoring solutions, known as APM operational tools.

APM operational tools provide collaborative information that can be used by IT operations teams, network teams and emerging virtualization teams to monitor how every application and infrastructure component performs within the end-to-end production environment. APM operational tools offer end-to-end visibility into every transaction flow, monitor hop-by-hop transaction response times and measure service quality from the eyes of the customer. They rely on a response time approach to capture how services and business processes are being delivered. These horizontal monitoring tools take performance visibility enterprise-wide, and consider the performance impacts of third party service environments, Clouds, virtualization, network infrastructure, and operational contexts such as concurrency of accesses, load and effects of breaks.

6 | INETCO Insight Product Overview — Transforming Raw Data into Complete Business Transactions

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Introducing INETCO Insight— A new kind of APM software for IT operationsINETCO Insight represents a major milestone in the evolution of APM operational tools. It is a new kind of application performance monitoring software for IT operations teams that are focused on service quality and business process delivery across complex, diverse, and fast-changing enterprise environments involving multi-channels, third party hosted services, virtual servers and Cloud-based application environments.

INETCO Insight is the only transaction-based APM solution that can capture every transaction in real-time, organize all the application, infrastructure and response timing data, and make it easier to isolate underperforming application components or infrastructure bottlenecks quickly—without the use of agents, extra traffic load or code changes.

INETCO Insight helps IT operations teams make APM data actionable by:

●● Gaining access to network infrastructure and application performance intelligence through a single, collaborative platform

●● Obtaining a correlated, end-to-end view into transaction response times, service quality and real-time business process delivery that impact the end user experience

●● Implementing advanced alerting, on-demand search and trending capabilities that lead to faster problem isolation and access to relevant performance data

This can all be achieved without having to recreate problems (or wait for them to happen again), turn on specialized diagnostics that address individual IT domains, or correlate performance data collected from different sources. Most INETCO Insight customers are up and running and getting value from the product within 48 hours.

“The primary driver for the implementation of INETCO Insight was to provide an operational view of our transactional environment that reflected the customer’s experience. This is particularly true when system performance degrades as opposed to complete system failures. INETCO Insight allows us to easily adjust our view and sensitivity to proactively detect the onset of system degradation.” NEAL BRESLER, OPERATIONS AND SECURITY MANAGER, TRANSACTION JUNCTION

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What types of applications can be monitored with INETCO Insight?INETCO Insight has been battle-tested in high volume banking and telco environments. This powerful technology has now been broadened into a platform for monitoring any application and many applications at the same time. In addition to multi-channel payment and value added service (VAS) environments, INETCO Insight 5 can be easily deployed and scaled to monitor any custom, packaged and industry-specific applications within physical, hosted, virtual or Cloud-based production environments. These include:

●● Electronic transaction processing applications (EFT, ATM, POS, VAS, Mobile, Online Banking)

●● Web-based applications (HTTP, XML, SOAP, SQL, etc.)

●● Distributed messaging applications (AMQP, MQSeries, TIBCO, etc.)

●● Vertical-specific applications (e.g. trading, electronic health records, retail, etc.)

“Application transactions that fail, slow down, queue up or hit a bottleneck will impact Open Solutions’ business in significant ways. The risk of service disruption can result in incomplete customer transactions and revenue losses. We would recommend that INETCO Insight become a strategic investment for any enterprise since it sits at the heart of IT management.” PAT CRIDGE, SENIOR MANAGER OF OPERATIONS, OPEN SOLUTIONS CANADA

The operational and business value of INETCO Insight IT operations teams deploying INETCO Insight will recognize the following operational and business benefits:

●● Improved cross-team collaboration — INETCO Insight captures the application, infrastructure and response timing data you need, all in one place, to drive quick, coordinated problem resolution without having to deploy a number of point solutions addressing individual IT domains or correlating performance data collected from different sources.

“INETCO Insight is the only tool out there that brings real-time network, application and transaction intelligence together in one location. Sharing this tool with our service partners, such as the Royal Bank of Canada, has greatly expedited problem resolution.”KIN LEE YOW, FORMER GENERAL MANAGER GATEWAY SERVICES AT MONERIS SOLUTIONS

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●● End-to-end visibility into service quality and business process delivery — Visibility into the end user experience and all the contributing factors and dependencies across an enterprise environment is near impossible to achieve without an application performance monitoring solution such as INETCO Insight that can correlate, in real-time, application transaction response times across multiple protocols, tiers, and 3rd party services deployed in physical or virtual environments.

“…With INETCO Insight, the EFT network and Operations teams can monitor a customer’s entire end-to-end FIS solution, including network performance and the host processing applications’ performance, and isolate issues affecting any transaction in a matter of seconds.”NEIL COOK, DIRECTOR OF EFT TECHNOLOGY AT FIS

●● Faster problem isolation — INETCO Insight customers have reported streamlined troubleshooting processes, faster access to relevant data and a reduction in Mean-Time-To-Resolution (MTTR) by at least 65%.

“INETCO Insight supports our goal to continually enhance customer service, first call resolution rates and operating efficiency. The product will help us streamline our support processes and eliminate the hours spent troubleshooting and piecing together fragmented information gathered from our in-bound customer calls, deep dive application monitoring tools, command line traces and transaction logs.” LARRY FITCH, OPERATIONS MANAGER FOR THE JACK HENRY & ASSOCIATES PASSPORT EFT SOLUTIONS GROUP

●● Production friendly deployment — INETCO Insight provides an unprecedented level of scalability and performance visibility within a production environment, without the use of agents, extra traffic load or disruptive code changes. Most INETCO Insight customers are up and running and getting value from the product within 48 hours.

“Transaction profiling is a powerful dimension of application performance monitoring, but it hasn’t always been the easiest technology to deploy and configure due to its overhead and complexity when dealing with multi-tiered applications. A no-touch, network-based transaction profiling approach overcomes some of these barriers, making transaction performance more easily accessible to a broader base of organizations.” JONAH KOWALL, RESEARCH DIRECTOR AT GARTNER INC.

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What makes INETCO Insight different?Supporting product features for the operational and business benefits outlined above include:

Improved cross-team collaboration

●● Configurable data grouping and web-based dashboards — INETCO Insight features a highly flexible widget-based toolkit and extensive charting library for building eye-catching custom dashboards and improving the usability of application performance data. Tailor the user interface for different roles and applications, and display application response times, rates, errors, and events in a way that is easy to use and makes it easy to identify anomalies faster. Gain one-click access to transactions, events, and historical performance patterns.

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End-to-end visibility into service quality and business process delivery

●● Multi-hop transaction correlation and timing — INETCO Insight can automatically correlate transaction response times across as many as seven hops, making it easy to isolate underperforming components and service delivery issues, even for complex transaction paths involving distributed applications, multi-protocols, third party hosted services, virtual servers or Cloud-based applications. IT operations teams also gain end-to-end visibility into both technical transaction completion times and actual business process delivery times to compare and quickly identify when issues are impacting the end user experience.

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●● Application payload message decoding — Unique to INETCO Insight is a configurable engine that securely extracts important application-level data from application payload messages. This data contains a variety of information on end user experience, usability and habits, such as purchase or withdrawal amounts, customer ID’s, transaction ID’s or product ID’s. This information can be used to provide business context and is relevant to many IT operations teams for both priority troubleshooting, trending and reporting purposes.

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●● Network and transport metrics capture — In addition to transaction response times and application messages, INETCO Insight captures key network performance metrics such as delays, IP addresses and TCP details that help IT operations to streamline troubleshooting and drive quick resolution of network-related performance problems.

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Faster problem isolation

●● Continuous monitoring and real-time alerting capabilities — INETCO Insight features always on transaction capture and instant drill-down from high level alerts to individual transactions. Real-time, fault based alerts notify IT operations teams of service level issues related to failures, slowdowns, anomalies or other degradations in service quality or business process delivery, often before the user even realizes there is an issue. This evidence-based data can also reduce the number of hours spent in war rooms, third party “blame storm” sessions or bouncing trouble tickets between your teams.

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●● Transaction logs with search, query and filter capabilities — Instead of trying to recreate problems or wait for them to re-occur, IT operations can start investigating them instantly by performing on-demand search queries within the INETCO Insight live and 8-day historical transaction logs. INETCO Insight’s powerful search engine capabilities help teams navigate through large data sets and get to relevant information faster.

They can access a UTM profile and transaction topology map for every individual transaction that includes all the response time, application and network data needed to quickly isolate bottlenecks and underperforming application or infrastructure components.

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●● Trending graphs — INETCO Insight helps you model large amounts of transaction data and create long-range performance views with one-click drill-down capabilities. These graphs enable ad hoc queries and graphing of both live and historical application transactions. They help IT operations teams spot patterns and anomalies quickly, and answer application performance questions faster.

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Production friendly deployment

●● Agentless, network-based instrumentation — INETCO Insight requires no agents or code changes to capture and correlate every transaction—no touching the transaction switch. It can be integrated with capture equipment (such as packet brokers or vSwitches), or requires a passive feed of network data to be collected via SPAN ports. This makes it easy for IT operations teams to keep pace with rapidly changing application and infrastructure environments and scale INETCO Insight to monitor new services or applications within their live production environments—with zero deployment overhead. Provisioning is also standard and simple, as the software installs on a Windows Server. No hardware appliances, volume restricted “virtual appliances”, or custom ASICs.

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●● Universal Decoding Engine — INETCO Insight features a table-driven engine that decodes any application protocol. The product recognizes hundreds of internet, transport, and application protocols and variants out of the box, including IP, TCP (v4 and v6), UDP and other network layer protocols; HTTP, HTML, SOAP, XML, and other “Internet” protocols; AMQP, CLNP, TPDU, NIST, SQL, and other transport layer protocols; ISO 8583, FIX, IFX, OFX, VISA, and other application layer protocols both within and external to the financial segment. IT operations teams can monitor any custom, packaged, legacy or industry-specific application in production. For more detail, go to: Under the Hood of the INETCO Insight APM Architecture

●● Universal Forwarding — Universal Forwarding in INETCO Insight makes it easy for you forward alerts, statistics, and complete transaction records to any 3rd party system (e.g. log analyzers, event management systems, IT operations analytics platforms, and business analytics platforms). Packaged integrations are available for IBM Tivoli Netcool/OMNIbus, HP Operations Manager, NCR APTRA Vision, and Splunk Enterprise.

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Summary — Is INETCO Insight the right solution for you? INETCO Insight is a major milestone in the evolution of APM operational tools. It is a new kind of solution for IT operations teams that are focused on managing service quality and business process delivery across complex “new world” enterprise environments—many that involve multi-channels, third party hosted services, virtual servers and Cloud-based application environments.

INETCO Insight is an agentless APM solution that can be used to horizontally monitor key custom, packaged and industry applications. With INETCO Insight, IT operations teams will:

●● Gain access to network infrastructure and application performance intelligence through a single, collaborative platform

●● Obtain a correlated, end-to-end view into transaction response times, service quality and real-time business process delivery that is impacting the end user experience

●● Implement advanced alerting, on-demand search and trending capabilities that lead to faster problem isolation and access to relevant performance data

This can all be achieved without having to recreate problems, deploy a number of point solutions addressing individual IT domains, or correlate performance data collected from different sources.

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INETCO Insight provides the following features and benefits:

Improved cross-team collaboration

●● Configurable data grouping and web-based dashboards — Build tailored user interfaces and improve the usability of application performance data across all IT operations teams

●● Unified Transaction Model (UTM) framework —Improve the usability of big transaction data sets, analyze the response times, application payload message and network information for each individual transaction, and drive cross-team collaboration for quicker problem resolution.  

●● Transaction topology maps — Gain a step-by-step view of transaction execution that makes it easy for all IT operations teams to isolate problems without deep application knowledge.

End-to-end visibility into service quality and business process delivery

●● Multi-hop transaction correlation — Automatically correlate hop-by-hop transaction response times, including user think times, making it easy to isolate issues affecting service quality and business process delivery.

●● Application payload message decoding — Securely extract important application-level data from application payload messages to access a variety of information on end user usability and habits.

●● Network and transport metrics capture — Capture key network performance metrics such as delays, IP addresses and TCP details to drive quick resolution of network-related problems.

Faster problem isolation

●● Continuous monitoring and real-time alerting capabilities — Proactively identify failures, slowdowns, anomalies or other degradations in service quality or business process delivery.

●● Transaction logs with search, query and filter capabilities — Perform on-demand search queries within live and 8-day historical transaction logs to access relevant information faster.

●● Trending graphs — Model large amounts of transaction data and create long-range performance views to spot anomalies quickly, and answer application performance questions faster.

Production friendly deployment

●● Agentless, network-based instrumentation — Monitor all critical applications within live production environments—with zero deployment overhead.

●● Universal Decoding Engine — Quickly decode hundreds of internet, transport, proprietary and application protocols (including many flavors of ISO 8583, VISA 2, NCR/NDC+, Diebold, Triton, XML, HTTP, MS SQL, AMQP, etc.).

●● Universal Forwarding — Easily stream valuable information from INETCO Insight into your other monitoring and analytics platforms.

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About INETCO®—Every transaction tells a story®

INETCO® Systems Limited provides market leading transaction monitoring and analytics software that helps line of business and IT operations teams improve profitability, reduce operational costs and deliver an amazing customer experience. INETCO’s proven solutions are currently deployed in over 50 different countries. Happy INETCO Insight® partners and customers include some of the world’s largest companies spanning the banking, ATM, retail, telecommunications and payment processing markets. www.inetco.com

© 2014, INETCO Systems Ltd. All Rights Reserved. All referenced trademarks, registered trademarks, trade names, service marks and logos belong to respective companies. +1.604.451.1567 | insight@inetco.com | www.inetco.com

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