Prognosis: the key to better oversight of enterprise’s mission-critical resources

If you have been following IR in the news of late you will have likely read numerous articles and posts featuring Prognosis. With its focus on the financial industry, with payments solutions including payments switches as well as on the HPE NonStop infrastructure business, it should come as no surprise to read as much as you may have given Prognosis’s premier position in both markets.

When it comes to monitoring, managing and optimizing the complex IT environments typical of both payments and infrastructure, Prognosis has evolved over time to be at the forefront of system, network and application oversight and reporting.

However, across today’s competitive landscape, more is required of solutions such as Prognosis than simply alerting operators and business managers that a resource is offline or transactions are failing. No matter the cause, it’s even more important for any enterprise supporting payments environments to know early in the cycle of potential failure to better prepare to take action – more often than not these days, actions that can be automatically triggered with remedial actions undertaken without any interruption of the services on offer.

A combination of analytics, encapsulating environmental knowledge in models and even optimization of the environment to the point where actions can be taken quickly and without generating unwanted, unintended consequences. It may be easy to shut down access to a single type of transaction, but must that action impact access to the transaction at all locations?

This was the theme of the feature article HPE Discover 2019: has the thought of branch transformation pushed you over the edge? published in FinTech Futures on July 17, 2019. Even as this feature addressed subject matter arising from this summer’s HPE big tent marketing event, HPE Discover 2019, it made reference to observations provided by Kevin Johnson, VP Sales – Payments Performance Monitoring at IR:

“Yes, you can look at data being generated as transactions occur and yes, you can load data into analytics platforms for analysis of trends, but in reality, being able to answer the simple questions in real time is just as important, if not more?

“Why did the transaction just fail this very minute? Why is this region seeing performance degradation? Why are so many transactions being declined? They all demand immediate response and as we’ve seen HPE NonStop grow to be more scalable and high throughput, while at the same time fitting more seamlessly into the modern data center, we understand that Prognosis also has to continue to evolve to monitor ever growing workloads in a new type of data center.” 

This feature in FinTech Futures also highlighted how IR has been the benchmark for all monitoring solutions on NonStop, with the bulk of NonStop customers relying on Prognosis. There is the support for a single pane of glass just as there is visibility of multiple system components and networks and yes, even clouds. It truly is becoming a world of Hybrid IT, after all!

In case you missed reading the previously published feature feature article published in the August, 2019 issue of NonStop Insider, Prognosis – “providing intelligent alerts to issues and rapid troubleshooting to identify and solve problems before they become client or customer issues.” there was a reference in another post, Real Time Visibility in Managing Alternate Payment Channels to the IR blog by Jason Krebs, a Senior Product Manager at IR. In this feature to NonStop Insider, Krebs is quoted as having said:

“With deep data visibility, real time tools can provide intelligent alerts to issues and rapid troubleshooting to identify and solve problems before they become client or customer issues. Deep visibility also enables detailed analytics to be performed on performance and transaction flows.”

“The service should allow real-time visibility throughout the entire payments environment.

“Businesses that effectively manage multiple payment channels provide consumers with the convenience they want. Their customers feel more willing to make purchases with payment options that they prefer and trust.

Well managed systems, whether it is with NonStop systems in general or financial industry payments solutions, the issues are the same. Don’t just provide information of resources and transactions that have failed! Instead, advise IT of what was failing and the recovery steps taken and yes, advise IT of any compromises that may have been made while corrective action was being taken so IT can follow-up.
Coming up shortly is the IR Summit – Denver that will run between Tuesday October 15, 2019 and Thursday, October 17, 2019. This is IR’s official Prognosis users’ conference and if as yet you haven’t registered then time is running short. For all the information you need about this event, check out this page on the IR web site: https://www.ir.com/events/summit. It is to be held at the very popular Englewood, Colorado venue – The Hilton, Inverness.

If you are looking to experience intensive and at times, fully hands-on sessions, featuring everything you ever wanted to know about Prognosis then this is the event to attend! There will be additional IR Summits held later in the year including IR Summit – Frankfurt (November 26, 2019 at The Westin Grand Frankfurt) followed by IR Summit – London (November 28, 2019 at the Eight Moorgate.

Should attending this event be something you are looking to hear more about or if the topic of how best to monitor and then manage your systems, networks and applications that are mission critical is equally as important to you, then don’t hesitate to reach out to your local IR contact; they will be only too happy to hear from you.

Kevin Johnson,
VP Sales – Payments Performance Monitoring
www.ir.com