How to tackle massive growth among digital customers – the story of a large investor application?
The Client
The Company is a leading SEBI registered mutual fund company in India. It is focused on providing multiple financial services through an extensive network of consumer touch-points.
Given the sharp growth in digital interactions with customers, the company was putting extra emphasis on its primary online transaction channel – the investor portal and application. The platform caters to over 80 Lacs Live accounts with around 82% of the transactions created digitally. It was critical that the portal and application meet demanding customer expectations and be ready to scale as customers and usage rose.
The Situation
In its existing form, the portal had various issues
- The investor portal performance was sluggish – leading to user frustration
- The application was also found to go down frequently
- Even high net worth investors were often unable to log into the application and transact business
The company realized that due to the performance and low availability of the current investor application, it was falling short of the expectations of current customers. It was likely that this was telling on their customer satisfaction scores as well as hurting revenues. Also, it appeared that the application and the portal were not ready to address the envisaged investor base increase of 2X in the next 6 months.
The Solution
The client wanted the application architecture to be proactively assessed from the Performance, Availability and Scalability standpoints to ensure that the technology adopted was future-ready and scalable. They also wanted to fix the current issues and establish a sound base for growth.
Avekshaa, as one of the market leaders in the field of Performance Engineering, was engaged for the job. The Avekshaa team of performance improvement specialists applied its proprietary P-A-S™ Assurance Framework built around the company’s core IP, proven methodologies, deep experience, and knowledge base built from real-life scenarios. In addition, Avekshaa deployed cutting-edge monitoring tools from its AppNeura portfolio to ensure ongoing transparency and awareness.
To start with, the Avekshaa team conducted a gap analysis to identify the issues in the current system. The team also defined the key KPIs that would need to be addressed to handle the future load.
The team identified the following issues
- Hung threads, leading to requests queuing up. This led to degradation in the entire performance and application outage.
- Unnecessary synchronous calls between the IBM Mobile First Platform and third-party systems, leading to unwanted load on the system.
- Connection leaks in the code
- Sub-optimal OS kernel and network parameters, leading to connections remaining in the WAIT state.
- A lack of traceability and preventive mechanism in the monitoring strategy – because of this, the client could not get early warnings and achieve quicker MTTR.
Apart from fixing the current issues, with the projected growth of users and usage, it was critical to ensure that the application continues to deliver the desired level of performance.
For that, Avekashaa deployed its suite of products from appNeura, Through its AI and ML based capabilities, the product provided a unified dashboard that gave transparent visibility into trends and detected anomalies. The product performed the real-time monitoring of Server Resources, Application logs, and other key performance KPIs. This helped in identifying bottlenecks and problems with all the metrics. This information was available in a single dashboard available to all the relevant stakeholders, leading to quicker MTTR. The Avekshaa team also created customized dashboards across all the servers
Business Impact
After the implementation of the architecture recommendations, the company experienced several benefits such as –
- Failures due to hung threads were completely eliminated.
- Manual restarts of instances were completely eliminated.
- The architecture was validated to scale to 2X load in the simulated environment.
The enhanced monitoring strategy appNeura product suits, helped in creating an early warning system and enabling quicker MTTR.