Mitsubishi UFJ NICOS Co., Ltd.
Ensuring availability and quality of financial services with AppDynamics
Key benefits
Intuitive interface enabling teams collaborate better on troubleshooting
Ability to troubleshoot application performance issues remotely
Application performance visualized without changing the code
Mitsubishi UFJ NICOS offers a wide range of payment services from issuing credit cards, implementing payment systems for stores, to offering contract-based card issuance services. With AppDynamics, they visualized the performance of customer-facing applications and automated the reporting process.
“AppDynamics has enabled the operation and development teams to work more efficiently by allowing them to view the same information and seek solutions together."
Takaharu Nakamura
Manager of System Infrastructure Group, System Infrastructure & Operation Department,
Mitsubishi UFJ NICOS Co., Ltd.
Challenge
Advanced skills and considerable workload were needed for monitoring application performance and analyzing the performance drop.
Solution
In order to boost the efficiency of monitoring and managing application performance, Mitsubishi UFJ NICOS adopted AppDynamics Application Performance Monitoring (APM).
Results
AppDynamics visualized performance and automated reporting. It established a common language between development and operation teams. This also allows for the primary analysis of bottlenecks to be done remotely, saving the engineers’ time and effort from having to travel to the data center.
“Our goal is to implement AppDynamics across all of our systems to gain visibility into how application performance is affecting our customers’ service usage and ultimately, our business.”
Takaharu Nakamura
Manager of System Infrastructure Group, System Infrastructure & Operation Department,
Mitsubishi UFJ NICOS Co., Ltd.
Challenge
Monitoring of application performance and analysis of the performance drop require advanced skills and considerable workload
Mitsubishi UFJ NICOS offers a wide range of payment services from issuing credit cards to individuals and businesses, implementing payment systems for the participating stores, to offering contract-based card issuance services. The system infrastructure and customer-facing applications that support these businesses are the lifeblood of businesses. “It is essential to keep the availability and the service level as high as possible,” says Shuji Suehiro, General Manager of System Infrastructure & Operation Department.
“Troubles with customer-facing systems, such as web applications used by customers, can damage our company’s reputation and discourage customers from using our services. To prevent such situations, we need to thoroughly monitor and manage application performance. This is a crucial mission for the System Infrastructure & Operations Department,” says Suehiro.
With the rise of FinTech and digital transformation (DX), differentiating customer-facing digital services is more crucial than ever, and this has led to a heavier workload for managing application performance. The contracted developers of Mitsubishi UFJ NICOS used their own tools for monitoring application performance, resulting in a lack of unified management by the internal operation team.
Suehiro added, “Many performance issues arise during the development phase testing because of the incomplete quality. Identifying bottlenecks required both physical effort and technical skills. This situation often leads to increased workload and burnout for some engineers with the necessary skills. Therefore, we had no choice but to optimize and automate our operation using technology.”
Solution
Efficient management of application performance enabled by APM and user-friendly interface
Mitsubishi UFJ NICOS adopted the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) to effectively monitor application performance and analyze performance issues. AppDynamics, chosen as a solution to realize APM, is mainly used to manage the performance of customer-facing web applications.
According to Takaharu Nakamura, Manager of System Infrastructure Group, System Infrastructure & Operation Department, AppDynamics was chosen for its ease of use, in addition to the positive evaluations by third parties and its extensive track record of use in financial institutions overseas.
“One of the objectives of implementing the APM solution was to allow anyone in the operation team and the application development team to see the system’s status and analyze the cause of troubles. Therefore, ‘ease-of-use’ was an essential factor in choosing the right product. AppDynamics automatically visualizes the application structure and sets thresholds for alert generation based on machine learning. The intuitive operation helps us easily identify bottlenecks per transaction. There was no other APM product as user-friendly as AppDynamics,” explains Nakamura on why they decided to go with AppDynamics.
The ‘ease of implementation’ was another positive factor in choosing AppDynamics. “Compared to other products that required code to be embedded in the software for bottleneck analysis and identification, AppDynamics can be easily set up by implementing the agent on the application server, with minimal impact on system load, which was a concern for the team,” says Nakamura.
Mitsubishi UFJ NICOS adopted AppDynamics in 2019 with the support of its business partner, Daiwa Institute of Research, and has been using AppDynamics to visualize the performance of customer-facing web applications.
Benefits
With AppDynamics, the development and operation teams collaborate better on performance-related issues
Suehiro explains the importance of establishing the system and structure for visualizing application performance as follows, “Once the system infrastructure has been standardized, we hardly experienced issues arising from the infrastructure. Most of the troubles are application problems, such as those related to database access,” says Suehiro. “Our infrastructure and application teams had to collaborate better in order to resolve these issues.”
Both their system operation team and the contracted application developers are sharing information in real-time through AppDynamics to solve and handle issues together. Since the application’s operating status was made visible to the operation team, they can troubleshoot issues more efficiently than before.
“AppDynamics has enabled the operation and development teams to work more efficiently by allowing them to view the same information and seek solutions together. AppDynamics serves as a ‘common language’ that facilitates communication and collaboration between the operation and development teams,” says Nakamura.
Users can easily view the real-time status of their applications on the AppDynamics dashboard. The dashboard also allows users to automate generation of scheduled reports, which reduced the operation team's workload.
“Before using AppDynamics, our operation team had to visit the data center where the system was running in order to troubleshoot the problems. Now, AppDynamics allows us to perform initial investigations remotely, which has reduced the time and effort required for on-site troubleshooting.”
Takaharu Nakamura
Manager of System Infrastructure Group, System Infrastructure & Operation Department,
Mitsubishi UFJ NICOS Co., Ltd.
With AppDynamics, they can troubleshoot problems remotely. Nakamura talks about the outcome. “Before using AppDynamics, our operation team had to visit the data center where the system was running in order to troubleshoot the problems,” says Nakamura. “Now, AppDynamics allows us to perform initial investigations remotely, which has reduced the time and effort required for on-site troubleshooting.”
Furthermore, Nakamura highly praises the support system of AppDynamics. “We regularly receive support and guidance from our business partner, Daiwa Institute of Research, and proactive support service from Cisco (through Customer Success Service) to optimize our use of AppDynamics. We are satisfied with this support system, and also believe that it will help us effectively deploy AppDynamics across a wide range of systems to improve their availability and problem detection capabilities.”
Mitsubishi UFJ NICOS plans to expand the scope of AppDynamics based on the results of such implementation. Lastly, Nakamura talked about the use cases of AppDynamics. “Our goal is to implement AppDynamics across all of our systems to gain visibility into how application performance is affecting our customers’ service usage and ultimately, our business,” says Nakamura. “We also aim to establish a system that involves not only the operation and development teams within the system division but also the business division in order to continue improving software performance with the help of AppDynamics.”
About Mitsubishi UFJ NICOS Co., Ltd.
Mitsubishi UFJ NICOS Co., Ltd. is a core company of the Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group Inc., providing cashless payment services and engaging in infrastructure development. Their services include issuing credit cards under various brands such as “Mitsubishi UFJ Card,” “MUFG Card,” “DC,” and “NICOS” for individual and business customers. They also provide various payment systems for the participating stores and offer credit and debit card issuance services for financial institutions and corporations based on a contract. Leveraging their long-term knowledge and experience in the business, Mitsubishi UFJ NICOS is well-prepared to meet the diverse payment needs of the future.
About Daiwa Institute of Research Ltd.
As a think tank for the Daiwa Securities Group, Daiwa Institute of Research Ltd. provides solutions based on advanced data analysis, AI, and DX, primarily in the areas of systems, research, and consulting.
Resources
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