Financial Services

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Case Study: Enhancing Database Performance and Customer Experience for a Global Financial Services Firm

Introduction
In the fast-paced financial services sector, performance, availability, and reliability of database systems are critical to maintaining customer trust and meeting regulatory obligations. A global financial services firm—managing billions in daily transactions—faced escalating latency issues in their core banking applications and inconsistent performance across distributed database environments. By leveraging Enteros UpBeat, the firm achieved breakthrough visibility into its database operations, enabling rapid root cause detection, cost optimization, and improved customer satisfaction.

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The Challenge
The company was experiencing a range of operational issues across its cloud and on-premise database infrastructure:

Transaction Delays and Timeout Failures: Thousands of retail and commercial banking users encountered transaction failures and service latency during peak usage windows.
Inefficient Resource Allocation: The firm’s cloud database instances were auto-scaling without precision, resulting in excessive resource usage and escalating costs.
Visibility Gaps: Traditional monitoring tools failed to provide real-time insight into cross-environment performance degradation and did not correlate resource usage with transaction patterns.
Customer Experience Decline: Prolonged service disruptions affected customer satisfaction scores and triggered internal compliance audits.

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Enteros UpBeat Approach
The financial firm partnered with Enteros to deploy the Enteros UpBeat platform across its critical database environments, including Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, and cloud-hosted PostgreSQL instances.

High-Frequency Observability: Enteros UpBeat collected and analyzed performance metrics every 3 seconds across more than 200 database nodes, capturing subtle yet impactful anomalies.
Multivariate Anomaly Detection: Enteros UpBeat used advanced statistical learning algorithms to detect deviations from historical baselines and proactively identify underperforming SQL queries, high I/O operations, and locking conflicts.
Intelligent Session Tracing: The team traced specific customer sessions exhibiting abnormal latency, pinpointing problematic transactions down to the SQL statement level—enabling targeted remediation.

Discovery and Resolution

Root Cause Identification: Enteros UpBeat revealed a pattern of excessive buffer cache invalidations caused by suboptimal index usage on frequently accessed tables. This issue remained undetected by legacy tools.
Cloud Cost Optimization: By analyzing real-time workload behavior, Enteros UpBeat recommended a revised auto-scaling policy that reduced unnecessary cloud instance proliferation on AWS RDS.
Resource Utilization Balancing: Enteros’ insights enabled the DBA team to redistribute workloads across clusters and schedule heavy transaction processing jobs during lower-load periods, ensuring consistent service performance.

Results

30% Faster Transaction Response Time: System-wide improvements reduced peak-time transaction latency, directly boosting online banking performance.
45% Reduction in Cloud Database Costs: Optimized scaling policies and smarter resource distribution drove substantial cost savings across AWS and Azure environments.
99.99% Uptime for Core Banking Applications: With Enteros UpBeat’s continuous monitoring and proactive alerting, the firm maintained near-perfect uptime during quarter-end financial reporting cycles.
Increased Customer Satisfaction Scores: The improved performance and reduced disruption significantly lifted the Net Promoter Score (NPS) and customer retention metrics.

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Conclusion
This case study underscores Enteros UpBeat’s value in solving complex database performance issues in the financial services industry. Through real-time anomaly detection, workload-aware scaling, and deep diagnostic capabilities, Enteros empowered the client to modernize its data operations, reduce risk, and elevate customer experience. Today, the firm relies on Enteros UpBeat as a mission-critical tool to drive data-driven growth and maintain its leadership position in global finance.

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