Announcing Journey Workbench (JWB)

Now, extract business metrics from telemetry with our advanced configuration engine

A recent survey by the IBM Institute highlighted a pressing issue: C-suite confidence in IT teams is at an all-time low. IT leaders’ confidence in their departments fell from 69% a decade ago to just 47%. Over half of these leaders don’t trust their own teams to impact business outcomes. This decline stems from a simple truth – many IT departments measure insular metrics that often have little bearing on broader business goals.

Observability platforms have tracked various operational metrics for years, but they’ve offered a bottom-up, fragmented view. While Full Stack Observability platforms brought these indicators into a single view, they still struggle to link them back to tangible business impact.

Journey Workbench (JWB): Business-Centric Observability Made Easy

Journey Workbench (JWB) redefines observability by transforming raw telemetry into actionable business insights, directly aligning IT performance with strategic business objectives. Unlike traditional tools—such as APM (application performance monitoring), NPM (network performance monitoring), log analytics, or full-stack observability solutions—that provide isolated views of the IT ecosystem, JWB bridges the gap between technical health and business outcomes, using a domain, transaction, and a journey centric approach to capture the full context of traditional observability metrics – logs, metrics, and traces.

Key Features of JWB:

• Domain-Centric Schemas:
  Preloaded with industry-specific schemas for payments, lending, and banking, JWB easily extends to additional journeys and unique business needs.
• Out of the Box Business Dashboards and Alerts:
  With ready-to-use, business-centric views, JWB delivers easier access to early warning indicators, focusing on user experience and business impact rather than isolated metrics.

Key Benefits of JWB:

• Business-Centric Incident Prioritization:
  Shift from isolated alerts to a business-focused Mean time to Detect (MTTD) and Mean time to RCA/Resolve (MTTR), enabling faster and more strategic responses.
• Real-Time Business Health:
  Real-time business metrics allow IT Operations, SREs, and business teams to instantly understand the broader impact of operational issues.
• End-to-End Transaction Visibility:
  Track complex, distributed transactions across every touchpoint with business-relevant metrics, ensuring customer support has complete visibility.

Fig 1: Impact of Journey Workbench

The Building Blocks of Journey Workbench

Journey Workbench (JWB) is built on essential, high-performance components designed for end-to-end business observability. Key elements include the Business Observability Configuration Studio (vuBOCS) and advanced platform enablers within vuSmartMaps™, such as ContextStreams (Observability Pipelines), the HyperScale Data Store (High Performant data store), specialized Data Models, and powerful Data Visualization tools. These building blocks transform raw telemetry into business-aligned insights in real-time at scale, enhancing visibility and control across digital journeys.

vuBOCS (Business Observability Configuration Studio)

In today’s complex application ecosystems, a single transaction may traverse multiple applications, microservices, APIs, and various infrastructure layers, each requiring precise tracking to ensure seamless operation and effective monitoring. The Journey Workbench (JWB) is designed to address this complexity. It introduces vuBOCS, a core component of JWB, which enables IT and business teams to transform raw telemetry into actionable insights with the following essential elements:

1. Full Pre-Defined Domain Schema Library

The domain-centered Schema Library in vuBOCS offers a rich collection of schemas for critical digital services, such as payments, lending, and corporate transactions. It supports domain-specific adapters and interprets diverse protocols like ISO 8583, UPI payments, and lending APIs, standardizing telemetry into unified, business-focused metrics. This powerful foundation is also extensible to expand the schemas to support various other digital services and for custom business needs and workflows.

2. Transaction Configuration Studio (TCS)

The Transaction Configuration Studio provides robust pre-defined interconnected formats to correlate transaction data across multiple API calls. With TCS, essential performance indicators for digital transactions at each application can be quickly configured, enabling the powering-up of pre-built dashboards and alerts. TCS gives organizations a unified, business-oriented view of transaction metrics, allowing them to monitor performance and user experience seamlessly for each application.

3. Journey Configuration Studio (JCS)

Journey Configuration Studio enables teams to correlate transactions across all touchpoints in a journey, establishing linkages for the transaction through each microservice or application layer. This end-to-end visibility empowers both operations and customer support teams to identify issues at any point in the journey, making it easier to understand and resolve potential disruptions.

Fig  2: Understanding JWB Components

Platform Enablers

To enhance the capabilities of the Journey Workbench, we also made key updates to our vuSmartMaps™ platform, introducing powerful new features designed for scale, efficiency, and in-depth transaction and journey analysis:

1. ContextStreams

ContextStreams now seamlessly integrates with a Pre-defined Schema Library, enabling quick configuration of domain-centric adapters and real-time telemetry transformation. Enhanced with additional plugins, this module can process domain-specific adapters at an impressive scale, benchmarked to handle over 20,000 transactions per second (TPS). The semi-automated configuration further accelerates setup, making it a highly efficient pipeline for business-centric observability.

2. HyperScale Data Store

The HyperScale Data Store has been upgraded with a transaction dependency graph, which stores enriched transaction information along with associated metadata. This enhancement facilitates rapid data retrieval and analysis, allowing teams to easily access the contextual details they need to understand and monitor transaction health across journeys.

3. Data Models

Optimized for high performance, Data Models support running materialized queries and jobs on stored data, providing deep, actionable insights. The model is tailored for complex analysis and allows organizations to unlock patterns and trends within their transaction data, making it an essential component for high-level business observability.

4. Data Visualization

Data Visualization now comes prepackaged with transaction and business-centric comprehensive storyboards. These storyboards include detailed transaction metrics, deep transaction ID searches, micro-API or micro-journey views, and drill-downs into operational metrics. These visualizations support real-time queries and offer consistent, actionable dashboards across multiple business journeys, enabling faster root cause analysis and empowering decision-makers to stay on top of operational performance and business impact.

Fig 3: Journey Workbench in vuSmartMaps™

Glipmse into Journey Workbench (JWB)

Journey Workbench provides a robust foundation to vuSmartMaps™ offering seamless, business observability tailored to the complexities of modern digital transactions.

Fig 4: Journey Workbench Dashboard

Fig  5: Partner/API Specific Dashboards

Fig 6: Microjourneys with transaction value

Fig 7: Technical and Business-Specific Failures

How it Works: 5 Easy Steps to Configure a Business Journey with JWB

Fig 8: 5 Steps to Configure a Business Journey with JWB

Step 1: Journey Discovery

• Identify infrastructure and application touchpoints associated with the journey for comprehensive monitoring.

Step 2: Data Acquisition

• Deploy agents, set up the ContextStreams data pipeline, and collect essential metrics into the HyperScale Data Store.

Step 3: Schema Selection and Transaction Adaptor Configuration

• Select the appropriate transaction schema from the Pre-defined Schema Library and configure the domain-centric adapters for precise data collection.

Step 4: Data Validation

• Validate and ensure data quality and availability for seamless transaction monitoring.

Step 5: Application & Journey Onboarding

• Configure key transaction analytics, volumetrics, and dimensions (with Transaction Configuration Studio), and build dependency maps (with Journey Configuration Studio) for detailed visibility.

By following these steps, you can achieve end-to-end visibility over complex, distributed business journeys. This approach vastly simplifies implementation time cycles and adds context to every transaction. This visibility extends to both IT and business metrics, so you know where an issue exists and how it impacts your business.

Real-World Impact: Journey Workbench (JWB) in Action

In early deployments across customer environments, Journey Workbench (JWB) has proven critical for organizations managing high transaction volumes—up to 5,000 TPS and 30TB of daily data. With the JWB implementation, these organizations achieve comprehensive, end-to-end observability, delivering targeted insights and measurable improvements in operations. Here’s how :

• Targeted Monitoring for Cross-Functional Teams:
  Multiple teams across IT, SREs, relationship managers, CXOs, and support teams, are offered tailored insights relevant to that persona. CXOs gain visibility into real-time revenue impacts on transactions, with the potential to reduce revenue leakage. IT teams can address technical issues 10x faster with business-prioritized alerts and actionable insights.
• Key Business Metrics for Critical Payment Journeys:
  For high-impact journeys like instant (ex: UPI) and bill payments, vital metrics are tracked such as transaction success rates and customer engagement, achieving up to 20% improvement in transaction success. Identifying and proactively addressing pain points can help improve user retention.
• Transaction Tracking for Customer Support and Retention:
  With the ability to search transaction IDs across services like UPI, IMPS, and bill payments, support teams resolve issues 50% faster and reduce customer churn through proactive incident detection and resolution.
• Enhanced Telemetry for DevOps Teams:
  As part of the domain-centric adapters build-out, the telemetry is analyzed in detail, allowing DevOps to improve log quality and transaction ID mapping, accelerating root cause analysis and increasing system reliability.

Looking Forward

Currently, Journey Workbench (JWB) is optimized for key payment journeys, including Instant, Bill, and Corporate Payments. Our roadmap is focused on expanding JWB to encompass additional business journeys across Digital Lending, Credit Card Onboarding, and Trading, with future ambitions to extend JWB’s reach beyond BFSI into sectors like e-commerce, creating a unified observability solution across diverse digital ecosystems.

We are also accelerating the ease of onboarding new journeys with streamlined configurations and automation, moving towards a setup that’s fully automated in experience.

Further, we plan to introduce integrated advanced features such as Smart Alerts and anomaly detection, enabling more proactive and predictive monitoring to empower organizations with faster issue identification and a sharper focus on business impact.

Conclusion

With Journey Workbench (JWB), we’re simplifying and accelerating the configuration of business journeys, offering a unified, impactful view that integrates both business and operational metrics. This evolution reflects our commitment to business-centric observability, empowering enterprises to move beyond traditional, siloed ops metrics.

In a complex digital ecosystem, collaboration between business, operations, support, and DevOps teams is essential. JWB provides a common platform for these teams, enabling more informed, real-time decision-making and proactive issue resolution. Early deployments of JWB have demonstrated strong results, showcasing how organizations can achieve better alignment across teams and prioritize efforts based on true business impact and our strong roadmap only builds on this progress.

This ability to link IT performance to business outcomes is now a necessity, not a luxury. With vuSmartMaps™ and Journey Workbench (JWB), bridging this gap for digital transactions is now just a few configurations away!