The Client
Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria (BBVA) is one of the world’s largest banking and financial services groups.
Founded in 1857, the bank has a presence in over 30 countries, mainly in Spain, the Americas, Turkey, and Romania.
In 2007, the firm started an initiative to digitally transform the bank. Following implementation, it saw a 19% year-on-year increase in new customers.
The Need
BBVA employs its own in-house core banking software which it uses throughout Uruguay.
This application is critical to the running of the bank’s operations and is used on a daily basis by staff across all of its branches.
Developed in Java, it uses a farm of eight Tomcat web servers. SQL Server is its preferred database engine server.
In total, there are more than 15 pieces of hardware involved in running the different services utilized by the system.
Due to having so many different systems of its own or from outside vendors, all using different technologies, when a performance problem would arise, it was very difficult to trace the cause.
Several teams at BBVA were spending vast amounts of time trying to investigate performance issues and tried to solve them.
BBVA needed a way to find and detect errors sooner, in order to ensure system availability and flawless service.
BBVA
€676 billion in assets in 2018
8,000 offices
125,627 employees
74.5 million customers
The Need
BBVA employs its own in-house core banking software which it uses throughout Uruguay.
This application is critical to the running of the bank’s operations and is used on a daily basis by staff across all of its branches.
Developed in Java, it uses a farm of eight Tomcat web servers. SQL Server is its preferred database engine server.
In total, there are more than 15 pieces of hardware involved in running the different services utilized by the system.
Due to having so many different systems of its own or from outside vendors, all using different technologies, when a performance problem would arise, it was very difficult to trace the cause.
Several teams at BBVA were spending vast amounts of time trying to investigate performance issues and tried to solve them.
BBVA needed a way to find and detect errors sooner, in order to ensure system availability and flawless service.
The Solution
Abstracta studied and charted all the key characteristics of BBVA’s system, developing a matrix with the advantages, disadvantages and costs of implementing a variety of monitoring tools such as Microsoft System Center, IBM Tivoli Monitoring, Nagios and OpenNet.
We agreed upon a monitoring plan and put it in place, which allowed the key performance indicators for both hardware and software components to be established for monitoring purposes.
OpenSTA was used for test automation and NMON for monitoring the server’s resources and database using statistics native logs.
Results
Once these indicators were in place, they provided the information needed to determine precisely when performance problems were occurring as well as relaying the exact status and condition of the main components at those times.
In this way, the Abstracta team introduced several improvements in the configuration of both the hardware and software (Tomcat, IIS & SQL Server) as well as at a system code level.
In less than one month, Abstracta resolved the problem of service downtime as well as every other problem highlighted by BBVA, allowing the system to function properly.
