Introduction
Robeco Direct is a direct distribution channel of fund manager Robeco focusing on private Dutch customers. Its website, www.robecodirect.nl, has been online for over five years. Through the years, the Internet has become Robeco Direct´s most important means of communication with its customers. Every day, the website handles visits by thousands of customers. The customers can view their investment portfolio and transaction history and enter their buying and selling orders. Robeco Direct’s objective is to become the online fund bank of choice in the Netherlands.
Excellent website performance and availability required to provide a high level of service for customers
Ollivier Trouw, Robeco Direct´s Support Manager: “If your objective is to become the online fund bank of choice, this means your website is business-critical and has to offer 24/7 availability and performance. Our customers use the online channel for quick and convenient inspection of their investment portfolios. Every second an application is unavailable is damaging to our company. And since we are obliged to offer excellent service, our website has to function properly. You can compare it with the branches of any bank. If you find the doors closed during regular opening hours, you won’t wait around for ages.”
The need for application performance data urged Robeco to look for a monitoring tool.
Over two years ago, Robeco Direct started evaluating tools that could measure website availability and performance. Ollivier Trouw: “We already worked with Emprix, a ‘robot’ that measured the availability of our website by means of synthetic transactions. Since it worked well, we had availability measurement under control and were able to proactively respond to failures. However, Emprix did not provide any insight into the way our applications performed. If performance is bad, you can be sure of customer complaints. And more often than not, a drastic reduction in performance will result in a period of non-availability. Needless to say, that was something we wanted to avoid.”
Robeco Direct required a tool that measured the performance in real time, provided insight into real customer experiences and included analysis features that allowed the fund bank to proactively tackle performance issues. A pilot project for an active monitoring tool failed to provide the necessary information since it was based on a robot that performed synthetic transactions. A simulation of what is, in fact, a single user won’t provide any information on real users.
Real User Monitoring with webProbe
webProbe uses a data collector that is connected to a switch in the network and measures all incoming and outgoing traffic by means of network protocol analysis. Trouw: “This means we are continuously provided with a clear picture of reality. We are in fact measuring the real customer experience. We are now able to measure the performance of all the website’s transactions, pages and objects. Notification takes place on the basis of our SLAs. For instance, if it takes longer than x seconds to log in, an alarm will be triggered. Notification will be sent to the department responsible, which will then call in a task force to solve the problem. At nights, notification is sent to the operators of the Robeco Group. These form part of the Robeco Group ICT business unit, which manages the infrastructure. They check if they are able to solve the problem. If they are not, Robeco Direct’s support department will be called in.”
The results
Ollivier Trouw: “We now have an overview of the exact number of visitors in relation to the website performance. All data is stored in a data warehouse cube. We are able to make all sorts of analysis on this cube. One of the things we found out was that the performance would not only drop when the website received large numbers of visitors, but also at times when few visitors were present. It turned out that at nights and during weekends, the performance was reduced as a result of other processes that were running at the same time. Without the measuring statistics, we would have had a hard time getting to the bottom of this problem. For instance, we noticed that the performance dropped every last Saturday night of the month, so we rescheduled our batch and backup processes, and the problem has disappeared.”
Robeco Direct is now also able to see precisely at which point particular customers give up. Trouw: “That is possible with other tools as well. webProbe, however, allows you to see the root cause of problems. For instance, some of our customers were having problems logging in, something that was caused by the DNS references of some ISPs. We also found out that many of our customers still do not own a broadband connection. This type of information is very valuable to our developers.”
Trouw wishes to retrieve more performance data that could be useful to Robeco Direct’s developers. “For example, we found that the creation of the transaction history took up more time than specified in the SLA. This was because the architecture included several links to external systems. The analysis data provided by webProbe allowed us to implement the necessary technological enhancements.”
Moniforce
When Robeco Direct started working with webProbe, Moniforce was still a relatively small company. However, this was not an issue for Trouw. “When we set out using webProbe, we were one of Moniforce’s first customers, so whenever there was a problem, the company was able to respond quickly. Now they have so many large customers, we have to make agreements in advance. That said, whenever we have a real issue, Moniforce can offer us immediate support. Moreover, our investments in Moniforce’s tools was much lower than would have been the case with tools by major American companies. And after all, if you decide to be a pioneer, you should be open-minded about new developments.”