Intercept Studio and Business Activity Monitoring:

Enabling Operational Intelligence

The Demand for Business Activity Monitoring
The competitive nature of today’s business environment necessitates a real-time view into business processes and performance metrics. To maintain a competitive edge and ensure high levels of customer satisfaction (oftentimes a key differentiator), organizations require tools that not only monitor business processes but also deliver actionable information that can be easily analyzed to affect change.

The distributed nature of applications and the growing reliance on service-oriented architectures has complicated the ability to monitor and track business transactions. By deploying a business activity monitoring solution, powered by Intercept Studio, your organization can gain unsurpassed insight into real-time business events and automatically be alerted to those events that pose the most risk to your business.

Intercept Studio and Operational Intelligence
For example, Intercept Studio can monitor critical web applications to track the success or failure of customer transactions. If an application experiences a failure or performance slow-down, Intercept Studio can detect and diagnose the problem at the moment it occurs. In addition, Intercept Studio provides immediate alerts and identifies the user(s) impacted. With proactive notification and definitive root cause diagnosis, your organization is best-equipped to respond to this threat and resolve the problem quickly, minimizing the adverse impact on your business.

Intercept Studio is a flexible solution that is easily customized to your environment. With the ability to gather details on specific business activities, including parameters and variables related to specific functions and methods, Intercept Studio delivers operational intelligence: you can see the exact request made by your customer or internal system user; you can measure response times for Service Level Agreement compliance; you can track and measure the success of your key business applications.

Intercept Studio is uniquely capable of monitoring your business applications in the production environment. That means you can establish critical performance thresholds, monitor real-world application use, and analyze user and application behavior.

With Intercept Studio powering your business activity monitoring solution, you achieve:

• Automated notification of potential and existing application problems
• Real-time insight into how application events affect business transactions
• Application use knowledge that drives future application decisions
• Historical reporting of application and business process performance

Intercept Studio and Business Activity Monitoring: A Real-World Example
As part of an organization which currently employs 3500 people in 77 offices across 28 countries, XL Global Services (“XL”) sought to align its global businesses. Initially, XL began using Intercept Studio to diagnose application problems within its distributed insurance operations’ underwriting systems.

In addition to detecting and diagnosing application problems, Intercept Studio allows XL to monitor business processes, “giving us the capability to determine what is happening on any computer that is part of our global system,” says Lance Raffa, XL Global Services’ Director of US Development. “This not only translates into tremendous savings in terms of the time and money that otherwise would be spent troubleshooting problems, but also allows us to make certain that applications are being fully utilized and quality assurance is being built in at every step of the business process.”

The company is currently working on expanding Intercept Studio’s role to provide performance monitoring for 1500 international users running seven different applications simultaneously.

“We wanted to find ways to make our insurance applications more efficient,” notes Raffa. “By using Intercept Studio, we can detect the number of times a policy has been underwritten, how applications are running, and whether complaints about applications or the bandwidth of desktop computers are justified, all the while making sure applications are being fully utilized. We can also properly troubleshoot a problem occurring on the opposite side of the globe, drilling down to the precise line of code, without worrying about altering it in any way.”

The ability to immediately identify the root-cause of application problems and keep a watchful eye on business transactions and processes, while also gaining knowledge that improves application availability and reliability, reflects the experience of many of AVIcode’s customers.

To test drive Intercept Studio for yourself, and see how you can enable greater visibility into business activity monitoring, click here.