The process of tracking loans is complicated, data constantly changes, demand increases and decreases, number of loans processed in one day maybe different than during another day.
Bank customer wanted to visualize data and also get help in understanding data. Major incidents causing data to be distorted can happen at any time. Tracking each and every individual step within the process of client interacting with the loan refinance process is essential. One lost application not fully processed due to technical glitch or any other business related reasons can cause bank to lose potential customer. The loss of potential revenue is an obstacle.
Solution
Our company Binary Fusion upon engagement with the customer conducted
Sumo Logic Assessment analyzing precisely existing customer's environment, evaluating strength and weaknesses within their existing Sumo Logic environment.
In the process of evaluating customer's environment we reviewed precisely how much visibility customer has into their data. Upon our analysis we recognized that our banking customer didn't have much visibility into their critical application data.
- Based on such recognition we created custom algorithms designed to track customer's critical applications and visualized critical key performance indicators that helped our customer identify and resolve major incidents a lot quicker than before.
- As part of the engagement exercise we created not only pro-active solutions, but also designed and created predictive metrics that helped our customer identify the issues even before issues happened.
- We used variety of outliers with algorithmic standard deviation plots to focus on key performance indicators designed to provide proactive level of visibility for most common upcoming issues.
- Doing so helped our customer resolve complicated issues at a lot faster pace than ever before, thereby maximizing bank's overall money making effectiveness while simultaneously helping our banking customer reduce chances for expensive outages.
During the process of engagement we created custom search engines and dashboards designed to help customers quickly browse and search for their loan numbers, and view all the relevant data associated with the loan number and any of it's dependencies.
- Search engines were designed with auto suggestions and unique filters in such a way that helped customer quickly zoom into particular sub sections of data and be easily able to recognize what is relevant or what is not to a major incident.
- In the time when major incidents can cause millions of dollars loss, quick resolution of the major issues is at it's highest priority. Our uniquely created Sumo Logic dashboards helped our banking customer reduce the time that they were spending before seeking to identify problems by more than 76.25% percent.
- Initially when we started working with our banking customer before implementing our dashboards and unique search engines, we measured the amount of time it takes to resolve major incident starting from the beginning of the incident to the end of the incident. It was no surprise for us to see an incredible amount of time taken by our banking customer's staff just to identify the actual issue not to mention resolving it.
- Our customer's staff consisted of developers, business analysts, architects, IT managers, software testers and an entire army of staff dedicated to tracking loan processes. Every time MI happened multiple parties had to get on the call and ask each other questions. The process was very long and tedious. After mapping out the entire customer's environment in a visually appealing dashboard and tracking every single process from start to finish we noticed that the time it takes to resolve an incident was a lot quicker.
- Customer's staff were able to instantly bring up one of our Sumo Logic crafted dashboards and view key performance indicators that clearly spelled out and gave an incredible amount of insight to developers, business analysts and software testers as to what may have possibly caused the major incident that they were attempting to resolve. As a result, instead of waiting for hours to figure out what the issue is, our customer's staff were able to identify it a lot quicker.
In order to help you better understand how much quicker we are talking about millions of dollars of money saving.
Beyond Sumo Logic Dashboard
After visualizing data in Sumo Logic, we didn't stop there we went above and beyond in helping our customer succeed further. In addition to visualizing critical application data from business and process standpoint, we also needed to bring visibility into network architecture, system, infrastructure and user performance.
Our customer already had another tool such as Solar Winds and New Relic.
As part of our engagement with our customer we managed to clean up their Solar Winds environment and ended up monitoring all of the customer's network infrastructure ranging from routers, switches, load balancers, wireless controllers, domain controllers, exchange servers, remote access VPN appliances, video conferencing units, cloud architecture, transit gateways, VPCs, Linux hosted cloud servers, elastic stack, oracle clusters, ESX hosts, Cisco ISE servers, CUCM devices, AWS and Azure infrastructure and even kubernetes clusters.
With New Relic we managed to monitor the user interactivity with the web pages, and managed to track critical application processes from infrastructure standpoint in a way that helped our customer see everything they need to know from technical standpoint about the environment that is hosting critical applications.
- Having 3 different tools that handle different yet somewhat overlapping functions may sound like an overkill, yet the reality of it all is the fact that one tool can do much better job than another. When one tool couldn't handle something we used another one instead. In the middle of our engagement after adding all of the critical applications into Sumo Logic and creating unique dashboards and search queries with all sorts of alerting in place, we realized that the amount of data we are analyzing is quiet overwhelming.
- What became evident is the fact that not only did we have to process terabyte worth of data in Sumo Logic, we also had to process terabytes of data in New Relic and Solar Winds. Even with the most incredible written algorithms and search queries and dashboards and native capabilities of Solar Winds and New Relic monitoring network and infrastructure aspects of the environment, it was very well evident that our brains and our customer's brains simply couldn't process all of the data that was being thrown at us.
- Major incidents had tendency to happen for almost infinite amount of reasons, some of the reasons were due to network related issues, some for server related issues, some for cloud or DNS related issues, some for business related issues, some with logs related issues some with vulnerability related security issues, the list goes on and on and on.
- We needed a more robust solution than simply creating dashboards and custom search engines that helped users identify major incidents quicker. We needed something that helped us unify all our tools together.
- As a result we helped our customer by centralizing Solar Winds and Sumo Logic into New Relic Insight module for centralized monitoring. Logging into multiple tools was not a fun thing to do for our customer. It was proven quiet inefficient.
- Which is why as part of intermediate engagement we decided to centralize customer's environment based on the key performance indicators from multiple tools in one centralized dashboard, neatly over-layed with one another using the feature of heatmap to provide holistic centralized view for our customer from a single New Relic Insight dashboard.
- Upon creating such centralized dashboards that bring together multiple tools, we provided our customer flexibility to stay in one place without having to pivot across multiple tools unless they wanted to gain greater granularity and jump into other tools upon first navigating into a single centralized New Relic Insight tool.
- By centralizing network, infrastructure, and business visibility into singular centralized view we managed to increase overall trend capabilities for our customer, that helped our customer to see why the major incident happened, and what was most likely the reason behind major incident. By looking at the centralized dashboard it was easy to see for example if network outage caused incident, or perhaps Sumo Logic software didn't process logs fast enough and dropped them due to over utilized CPU or due to some process in application failing etc.
- Although centralized dashboard did decrease amount of pivoting from one software to another we still ended up with having way too much data that needed to be analyzed and processed, including data from network security tools such as Nessus showing vulnerabilities in applications and other tools.
The bottom line.
Which is precisely why during the final step of our engagement we added natural processing language capabilities, on top of our already well crafted centralized data and used machine learning with combination of AI to help our customer better understand why the major incident has happened, better categorize it's root cause, quicker bring it up to customer's staff attention and best of all use the machine learning capabilities to understand the data and provide our customer with an incredible insights for what would be the most likely reason why application process will fail in the future.
Since the initial step of populating critical key performance indicators into centralized dashboards was already conducted, it was relatively simple for us to train our algorithms using machine learning what is considered good and what is considered bad.
For example, we trained machine to recognize trends and identify most likely root cause for when the number of loans were no longer getting locked on time, or when the number of loan disclosures didn't correspond to the number of loans locked.
Our goal was to identify discrepancies and bring up these discrepancies to the attention of customer and help customer identify the most likely reason for such discrepancy. With natural language processing technique we were able to still rely on our manually written algorithms in combination with machine learning to produce full visibility and alerting capability for our customer, helping customer save money and reduce the frustration.
Want to learn more?
Interested in having Binary Fusion help your organization craft up similar solution or equivalent solution based on your existing critical applications, tools, and environment? If that's a yes then contact Binary Fusion today to discuss your environment with one of our sales reps and help you gain competitive advantage in your very own industry, regardless if it's banking or not.
We can craft up custom assessment proposal for your environment and help you gain the competitive edge over your competitors. Our company can help your company by augmenting your staff with additional team of specialized Binary Fusion and it's partners Sumo Logic, New Relic and Solar Winds IT professionals designed to help you take control of your network.
We can also help you secure, analyze and design your network with the help of an augmented staff brought to you by Binary Fusion and our partners. Our solutions range from complete network analysis, network support, cloud and service desk support as well as Data Analytics, Security solutions and beyond.
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