Non-Profit Federal Credit Union Exceeds SLA Guarantee with Entuity

Case Studies


Overview

A non-profit federal credit union found Entuity to have out-of-the-box flexibility, rapid implementation and ease of use. Entuity delivers both management and network engineer level reports on uptime, device availability, device inventory and utilization. Entuity also integrates well with other management solutions.

  • Increased IT SLA availability to 99.75%, exceeding guaranteed objective
  • Enhanced Help Desk call resolution with meaningful alarms, improving ability to serve members
  • Improved operational efficiency
  • Leveraged intelligent reporting to improve network utilization
  • Improved relationships with telecomm carriers and ISPs, increasing end-to-end performance and availability
  • Prevented service disruptions

Challenges

  • Network performance and availability problems impacted the guaranteed SLA requirement of 99.5%
  • No end-to-end service monitoring, no meaningful alarms
  • Budgetary constraints
  • Lack of consistent, reliable reporting
  • High levels of member service to maintain

Introduction for a Non-Profit Federal Credit Union

Under the philosophy of ‘people helping people’, this federal credit union is a member-owned, not-for-profit financial cooperative, and also one of the largest credit unions in the U.S. and the largest educational credit union overall with more than 260,000 members.

Their vision is to deliver world-class personal service to members through its 100 automated teller machines (ATMs), 24-hour automated telephone transaction service, and online banking system. They recognize that delivering exceptional value means providing operational excellence by combining service with technology and continually streamlining procedures, business processes and IT systems.

To deliver upon this vision, IT Operations is responsible for guaranteeing the organization’s stated service level agreement (SLA) of 99.5% availability of services. As the credit union added new branches, new members, and new applications, its SLA slipped to an average range of 98.9 to 99.1% availability.

Additionally, IT Operations relied on a rudimentary tool to “ping” their applications to determine availability. This ping capability was not adequate for truly measuring service degradation, performance or failure. As their network engineer explains, “We determined that a state-of-the-art solution providing event correlation and reporting capabilities was required to monitor the overall performance of our networks end-to-end and to generate meaningful alarms if a network event occurred.”

As a not-for-profit organization, they found balancing growth in membership with member expectations and budgetary responsibility to be a challenge. They needed a solution that could ‘manage itself’— be easy to use, Web-based, and require no additional resources.

Entuity offers:

  • High levels of member service to maintain
  • Availability management that distinguishes between network, server and application problems using root cause analytics, prioritizing problems based on business impact.
  • Performance management that predicts problems before costly business interruptions occur, using service degradation sensitivity.
  • Resource management that take inventory of network assets, their connectivity, and their logical dependencies in parent-child and peer-to-peer relationships.

“We selected Entuity because it provided both event suppression and fault correlation. With Entuity, we easily find where a problem is occurring without the system logging everything that is being affected.”
– Network Engineer

Additionally, the IT Operations team selected Entuity based on its following capabilities:

Accurate information and reporting:
Entuity pinpoints information, detailing what the problem is and where it is located. It provides the performance statistics of individual objects and ports and takes the performance of other ports into consideration.

  • Out-of-the-box flexibility, rapid implementation:
    Installation took 15 minutes and within 3 hours, Entuity discovered over 6,000 interfaces (approximately 400 devices) within the network.
  • Immediate effectiveness:
    Within an hour after installation, Entuity provided crucial information on where problems were occurring in their network.
  • Ease of use:
    The staff did not require formal training. Within days, the IT team was reviewing and analyzing data, utilizing Entuity’s built-in Help system, Event Viewer and reporting abilities.

The Results

Improved SLA Availability: “Within 90 days of implementing Entuity, we improved our IT SLA availability to 99.75%, exceeding our stated guarantee objective,” explained the network engineer. With Entuity, IT Operations is able to isolate and proactively resolve performance issues with the WAN, telecommunications carriers and ISPs.

Enhanced Help Desk Effectiveness: Within 3 days of implementing the program, the Credit Union’s help desk was isolating, troubleshooting and fixing problems they weren’t even aware existed. Entuity greatly improved help desk call resolution, improving their ability to serve its members.

Entuity helped the IT team locate performance degradation in the network. Based on this critical information, the team upgraded network cards to improve speed, performance and availability. These improvements relieved network congestion and reduced help desk call volumes.

Impact Analysis: “Utilizing Entuity, we discovered performance degradation caused by our telecomm carriers and ISPs. Entuity provided us with the detailed information and impact analysis to evaluate situations in real-time. For example, we quickly located a mis-configured ISDN line and bad cabling. We proactively worked with our service providers to resolve and improve these situations, increasing the overall performance of our applications and preventing service disruptions,” stated the Network Engineer.

With Entuity, the Non-Profit Federal Credit Union

  • Increased IT SLA availability to 99.75%, exceeding guaranteed objective
  • Enhanced Help Desk call resolution with meaningful alarms, improving ability to serve Members
  • Improved operational efficiency cost-effectively
  • Leveraged intelligent reporting to improve network utilization
  • Improved relationships with telecomm carriers and ISPs, increasing end-to-end performance and availability
  • Prevented service disruptions

“We determined that a state-of-the-art solution providing event correlation and reporting capabilities was required to monitor the overall performance of our networks end-to-end and to generate meaningful alarms if a network event occurred. With Entuity, we are not inundated with alerts; rather we receive intelligent, meaningful information and act quickly.”
– Network Engineer

About Entuity
Embracing the digital worldview, Entuity provides digital network analytics for the changing enterprise. Our highly automated, unified, enterprise-class solution puts deep network insight at your fingertips, frees IT staff to focus on strategic projects, and easily integrates with major framework environments. Entuity’s support and services teams are frequently praised for their rapid response, networking expertise and involvement in special engagements.