I thought Bank Innovation members might be interested in a recent blog post featuring the monitoring of Payment application performance with virtual, cloud and mobile environments, by INETCO.

The complete blog post can be found at:

Monitoring Payment Application Performance within Virtual, Cloud and Mobile Environments

I’ve also included the blog post below.

Hope you find it of interest.

Dan

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Monitoring Payment Application Performance within Virtual, Cloud and Mobile Environments

by Stacy Gorkoff | January 24, 2012

Within banking and retail environments, application performance monitoring (APM) is changing. This is because more and more service and payment transactions are originating from alternative payment applications based in Cloud, mobile or virtual environments. Monitoring the performance of these new services and payment applications is just as critical as traditional services that have been integrated within point of sale (POS) terminals, or automated teller machines (ATMs). But gaining real-time visibility into the performance of these off-premise applications can be tricky for a number of reasons.

Firstly, a wider choice of services and alternative payments translate into managing more message types and protocols. This can make the scaling of your existing monitoring solutions cumbersome. More complex, distributed infrastructures also present new challenges when it comes to performance isolation and capturing intelligence on the end-to-end transaction. In addition, the emergence of open platforms and multiple service options such as PayPal, Google, Amazon, Square, Zong, Boku, Facebook and Bitcoin are adding to the risk of third party vendor issues as well.

All of these challenges are leaving IT operations and managed services folks struggling to deliver consistent end customer experience across traditional and emerging payments channels. And these challenges are summarized in one question: “How am I going to manage what I can’t see?”

Cloud computing, virtualization and mobility are the main reasons there has been such a strong rally in IT operations centers and managed services teams around business transaction management (BTM) solutions. BTM solutions can provide end-to-end transaction visibility, extending monitoring into virtual, Cloud and mobile environments. They measure response times on a hop-by-hop basis, profiling transaction performance metrics that reflect network performance, application performance and what the end customer is actually experiencing. Response time measurements are a sure and simple way to pinpoint when and where transaction performance degradation is occurring within shared or Cloud-based environments that are not conducive to the deployment of agent-based application performance management solutions, transaction tagging or code changes.

So if you are truly considering the addition of alternative payment channels, be sure to equip your IT operations and managed services teams with a tool that can measure how those applications perform in the eyes of your end customers – which is their end-to-end response time. IT and managed services teams will be able to work smarter and faster when it comes to isolating performance issues, diagnosing multi-party issues, and spotting under performing payment application/card/transaction type combinations.

To learn more about how business transaction management solutions such as INETCO Insight can help you make alternative payments your mainstream, watch this 3 minute video:

Application Performance Management (APM) for Web, Cloud Computing and Mobile Payment Applications