What You Don’t Know About Your ATMs (and better monitoring will tell you)

ATM monitoring solutions are a good thing.  But are they enough to avert customer outages and incidents that impact key business performance within your ATM network infrastructure?

In today’s ATM network architectures, simple centralized systems no longer exist. The complexity associated with multiple vendor ATMs, network channels, payment gateways, switches, and distributed data centers has left more than one IT operations and applications support team scratching their head.

Then we have the emerging end-customer service demands.  Enhanced ATM fraud security and advanced service functionality such as account balance checking, bill payment, and loyalty programs equate to higher volumes of transactions, running through a multitude of service applications, many of these being web-based or belonging to third party software-as-a-service providers.

The success of today’s ATM networks is dependent on seamless interoperability between all these applications and heterogeneous systems.  Many traditional ATM monitoring solutions adopt the perspective of a single application’s performance profile.  While there is no denying that many transactions begin and end at the ATM, the performance details of a payment transaction, as it traverses the multiple service applications and networks, is becoming too valuable to ignore.

Lack of visibility into data exchanges and application response times means blind spots and performance gaps.  Blind spots mean undetected issues and longer problem isolation processes.  And this is why it is time to think about complimenting your existing ATM monitoring tools with a real-time business transaction management (BTM) solution.

The thing about complimenting your existing ATM monitoring tool with a good BTM tool is that it can potentially pay for itself with one outage.  BTM tools can include key performance indicators such as:

• End-to-end transaction query and response times (includes call timings for both client side and back end authorization processes)
• Transaction anomalies such as high dollar volume, recurring card swipes, and decline patterns
• Concurrent transaction rates
• Rates of approved, declined, reversed, failed and unsupported transactions
• Terminal IDs of ATM, POS, and other payment application devices

Gone are the frustrating hours spent trying to collect and piece together fragmented data from a variety of sources.  Implementing BTM, as it already has been done with Customers ATM, will eliminate blind spots, improve the end-customer experience, and avert customer outages and incidents that impact key business performance within your ATM network infrastructure.