Key benefits
80% faster error detection helps prevent interruptions for continuous service
60% reduction in error alerts resulting from proactive monitoring
20% improvement in website performance for improved customer experience
Kuveyt Türk, the 10th largest bank in Turkey, delivers award-winning modern financial products and services to millions of customers, including the country’s first interest-free digital banking platform. With Cisco AppDynamics, the bank dramatically reduced MTTR to prevent service interruptions.
“With Cisco AppDynamics we can identify the root cause of an error 80% faster than before."
Taner Öner
Head of Infrastructure Monitoring,
Kuveyt Türk
Challenge
Retain market-leading position in highly competitive Turkish banking sector by delivering continuously available, modern services to a growing audience of retail and corporate customers.
Solution
Cisco AppDynamics provides Kuveyt Türk with a unified view of critical systems—especially its popular website and mobile applications—so teams across the business can address issues quickly and deliver customer great experiences.
Results
Kuveyt Türk virtually eliminated downtime while significantly reducing mean time to resolution (MTTR), boosting performance, and freeing up its IT team to focus on the web and mobile customer experiences.
“There’s a saying in Kuveyt Türk: ‘Before AppDynamics and after AppDynamics.’ That really reflects the transformative impact that it has had on our organization.”
Kerem Hasan Erdem
Automation and Monitoring Applications Manager, Kuveyt Türk
Challenge
Building success on a culture of innovation
When it comes to modern banking, nothing is more important than the customer experience, especially with the ever-increasing shift to digital services. In Turkey, Kuveyt Türk is leading the way, offering award-winning financial products and services to its business and individual customers both online and through its network of 441 branches.
This relentless focus on quality also makes a significant contribution to the Turkish economy. Kuveyt Türk is now the tenth largest in Turkey with assets of $20.62 billion. It is also one of the world’s leading participation banks, which generate revenues by sharing the profits of customers instead of charging interest on loans. In addition, it takes a leading role in social responsibility projects including humanitarian aid campaigns and support for Turkish-Islamic arts.
Kuveyt Türk's success is built on a strong customer satisfaction focus along with a culture of advanced technology and innovation including its BOA Banking Platform, which allows its entire banking system to run on a single platform. In addition, it launched Turkey’s first interest-free digital banking platform, Senin Bankan (Your Bank), and an API market platform for entrepreneurs and fintech developers.
A customer experience fit for the 21st century
Kuveyt Türk hosts all systems on premises to comply with Turkish financial and data privacy rules. Cisco AppDynamics provides end-to-end visibility into applications and infrastructure including branches, mobile applications, point of sale (POS) transactions, websites and databases. Any issues that threaten to interrupt these services must be fixed as soon as possible.
Before deploying Cisco AppDynamics, the bank lacked a unified monitoring solution for tracking applications, identifying issues and responding to errors. After researching the market, Taner Öner, Head of Infrastructure Monitoring at Kuveyt Türk, and his team identified Cisco AppDynamics as the best solution for visibility across the bank’s applications.
In order to take full advantage of this effective tool, under the guidance of IT Group Manager Mehmet Murat Huyut, Öner and his team along with local partner Onotio, arranged trainings, presentations and projects to use Cisco AppDynamics efficiently as the best solution for the visibility into banking applications.
“In the past, it could take three hours or longer to resolve issues,” says Öner. “That isn’t acceptable for today’s banking customers. Cisco AppDynamics gives us a proactive approach that enables us to provide non-stop availability and an outstanding customer experience.”
Solution
End-to-end visibility of complex systems and processes
To support its Cisco AppDynamics deployment, Öner and his team sought the advice of ONOTIO Teknoloji, a leading AppDynamics implementation partner in Turkey.
Cansel Özcan, TechOps Division Manager at ONOTIO Teknoloji, says, “With Cisco AppDynamics, we saw a clear opportunity to provide Kuveyt Türk with a single, dashboard-based solution for monitoring dozens of applications with several different architectures.”
Working closely with the bank to understand its goals and underlying technology, Özcan and the ONOTIO Teknoloji team devised a program to deploy Cisco AppDynamics including Application Performance Monitoring, Infrastructure Monitoring, End User Monitoring, and Network Monitoring.
Öner was also keen to maximize the adoption of Cisco AppDynamics among the bank’s technology stakeholders including its database management and DevOps teams. “ONOTIO Teknoloji understood this from the start and planned a structured Cisco AppDynamics roll-out that would win the hearts and minds of our people,” Öner says.
Benefits
Transforming the business with actionable intelligence
The Kuveyt Türk monitoring team separates different types of business transactions into classes and applies different methods to maximize the performance of applications in each class. Cisco AppDynamics provides a comprehensive toolset that gives the team full visibility into this complex environment. In each of the classes, Cisco AppDynamics is essential in helping quickly pinpoint problems that can slow the timely completion of transactions and impact customer satisfaction. “With Cisco AppDynamics we can identify the root cause of an error 80% faster than we could before we had the drill-down visibility we have now,” says Öner.
To maximize the efficiency of its monitoring strategy, Kuveyt Türk conducted an integration study to establish a standard event record, define health rules and create alerts for slow application response times and errors.
“Each alert generated by AppDynamics creates a problem record for the development teams, and other responsible groups,” says Kerem Hasan Erdem, Automation and Monitoring Applications Manager at Kuveyt Türk. “This makes them accountable for responding to alerts, fixing issues and proactively improving application quality. As a result, we now see 60% fewer error alerts overall, and a 40% faster response to alerts.”
The team at ONOTIO Teknoloji integrated the health rules created in Cisco AppDynamics with Kuveyt Türk's existing monitoring tools. Today, the bank’s monitoring team enjoys a single 24/7 view of system availability and capacity across the entire network.
Kuveyt Türk also improved its website performance by deploying Cisco AppDynamics End User Monitoring. With Browser Real User Monitoring, the infrastructure team can track performance metrics of the bank’s corporate websites. “With Cisco AppDynamics our developers were able to eliminate issues in subsequent releases, leading to a performance improvement of 20% on our websites,” says Öner.
In addition, Cisco AppDynamics Mobile Real User Monitoring gives the team a clear understanding of how users interact with the bank’s mobile applications. Developers can then focus their efforts on making existing features more engaging and adding new ones that match changes in customer behavior.
“With Cisco AppDynamics our developers were able to eliminate issues in subsequent releases, leading to a performance improvement of 20% on our websites.”
Taner Öner
Head of Infrastructure Monitoring, Kuveyt Türk
At-a-glance performance data for executives
While Cisco AppDynamics dashboards provide essential monitoring information to specialist technology teams, they also provide a valuable at-a-glance view of application performance for executives. “We now have a single version of the truth for the whole of the business,” says Öner. “Whenever we are in meetings, everyone quotes from our Cisco AppDynamics dashboards.”
In fact, one of the greatest challenges facing Öner and his team is the sheer demand for new dashboards. “The more people see the opportunity to improve performance, they more they want to use Cisco AppDynamics.” He gives the example of a dashboard that tracks database queries with the highest response times. “With this information we improved database query performance by 30%,” he says.
Öner also stresses the role of the ONOTIO Teknoloji team and their Cisco AppDynamics expertise. “With ONOTIO and Cisco AppDynamics, most events can now be solved in a matter of minutes whereas before it took several hours. On one occasion, we called ONOTIO at 4 a.m. to fix an issue with the mobile banking app and they found a solution in just five minutes,” he says.
Looking to the future, Kuveyt Türk and ONOTIO Teknoloji have plans to expand the role of Cisco AppDynamics across the bank’s wider infrastructure. “We expect to integrate Cisco AppDynamics with Cisco ThousandEyes to gain network observability in addition to application and infrastructure monitoring,” Öner explains. “By achieving full-stack observability, we will have insight into every dependency and transaction in our digital service supply chain.”
"Whenever we are in meetings, everyone quotes from our Cisco AppDynamics dashboards.”
Taner Öner
Head of Infrastructure Monitoring,
Kuveyt Türk
Above all, Cisco AppDynamics is helping transform the performance of bank applications and the overall business. This includes the recent update to its mobile app which offers a redesigned interface, a more personalized experience and additional features including ATM cash withdrawals using QR codes. “There’s a saying in Kuveyt Türk: ‘Before AppDynamics and after AppDynamics.’ That really reflects the transformative impact that it has had on our organization,” says Erdem.
Öner can also see beyond benefits to the IT infrastructure teams, including the opportunity to offer Cisco AppDynamics-based observability as a service to other financial services organizations. “Cisco AppDynamics enables us to constantly refine and improve the experience for our retail and business customers. There are dozens of other participation banks that would benefit from this approach, which is great news for them and a great opportunity for us to grow new revenue streams.”
About Kuveyt Türk
Kuveyt Türk Katılım Bankası A.Ş. has been operating in the interest-free finance sector since 1989. It contributes to the development of participation banking with its dynamic corporate governance approach, innovative products, and global presence. It is the tenth largest bank in Turkey and one of the leading participation banks measured by funds collected, funds extended and asset size.
About ONOTIO Teknoloji
ONOTIO Teknoloji offers business expertise that supports its customers’ journey to the cloud and ensures they achieve value faster from this migration. It also enables customers to deliver a flawless customer experience with key business metrics that power faster decisions and enhance the digital experience. ONOTIO Teknoloji is an AppDynamics Elite Partner and a Cisco Full-Stack Observability Partner.
Resources
View all resources
The Age of Application Observability
Get insights from 1,000+ IT pros for optimizing application performance and delivering sustainable innovation in hybrid environments.
An introduction to Cisco AppDynamics
Discover how Cisco AppDynamics can help you see your technology through the lens of the business — so you can prioritize what matters most.
Achieving end-to-end visibility with Cisco AppDynamics and ThousandEyes
How to bring application observability and network intelligence together with ease.
Business Performance Monitoring
AppDynamics Business iQ delivers business performance monitoring and observability for every layer of your tech stack, so that you can work as one to prioritize what matters most.