Journey Observability

Introduction

VuNet’s Business Journey Observability is an innovative solution designed for real-time tracking and in-depth analysis of complex workflows and business journeys. VuNet’s Business Journey Observability is tailored to handle these complex workflows in the financial sector, such as online payment processing, credit card transactions, loan approval, etc., ensuring a seamless end-to-end experience with correlated, contextualized, enriched, and actionable insights. By observing logs, metrics, and traces from diverse applications and their components and services simultaneously, vuSmartMaps™ delivers correlated, contextualized, enriched, and actionable insights for both business and IT operations. With the cutting-edge 3T correlation methodology (Transaction ID, Temporal, Topology), this solution ensures precise stitching and correlation of transaction journeys in near real-time, providing swift insights into end-to-end processes.

Proactive Observability Strategies: Lead Indicators and Early Warning Signals

Lead Indicators, such as Technical Failure and Slow Response Time, are critical signals. An increase in the values of these signals provides insight into how users perceive your service. By using them, you can easily gauge customer experience and take necessary action before impacting more users who are accessing your service in near real-time.

Early Warning Signals, such as the health, availability, and performance of components, may not have an immediate customer impact. However, continuous degradation can affect your customer experience. The system promptly detects any signal deterioration, triggering notifications to the appropriate teams to ensure proactive resolution and mitigate potential impacts on customer experience within the business journey.

The system employs advanced observability algorithms to promptly detect any signal deterioration by continuously analyzing the health, availability, and performance metrics of components. This proactive detection mechanism allows for the swift identification of potential issues before they impact the customer experience within the business journey, saving valuable time in resolving emerging problems. For instance, in scenarios where components show early signs of degradation, the system’s timely notifications enable teams to proactively address issues, preventing service disruptions and ensuring a seamless customer experience.

Journey Observability

A journey refers to an end-to-end flow of a customer or system-driven request, traversing through a sequence of touchpoints, both internal and external. It executes a predefined set of business functions to fulfill the request to ensure a better user experience. Understanding and optimizing these journeys are central to improving customer experiences, operational efficiency, and achieving business goals.

The primary objective is to offer a comprehensive, end-to-end perspective of a particular journey. It enables both IT and Business teams to swiftly assess the current state of a given journey.

The use of multiple monitoring tools in enterprises often creates silos in observing data, requiring significant effort to correlate and analyze for issue resolution.

Observability View – Purpose & Benefits

Journey Observability provides a snapshot of the journey’s state and also detects when a journey is in an unstable or problematic state. This level of granularity is essential for quick issue identification and resolution. The observability view bridges the gap and ensures both business and operational aspects run smoothly.

• Business-Centric MTTD (Mean Time to Detect): This metric swiftly identifies issues impacting end-users based on key business metrics like transaction volume and failure rates. It serves as an early warning system, detecting deviations from expected norms and ensuring timely problem detection.
• Operations-Centric MTTR (Mean Time to Resolve): Focused on efficiency, Operations-Centric MTTR addresses and resolves issues promptly. Root cause analysis, examining impacted golden signals, minimizes the time required to restore normal operations, ensuring operational continuity.

The Journey Observability view is delivered by correlating and enriching data collected from three data sources – Logs, Traces, and Metrics. Together, logs, metrics, and traces constitute the 3 Pillars of Observability.

Logs

Logs are comprehensive records of system activities, offering detailed insights into various aspects of system behavior. They serve as a crucial resource for troubleshooting and enhancing system performance. When unexpected issues arise, logs act as the single source of truth, providing a detailed account of events and actions within the system. Analyzing logs is essential for identifying and resolving issues effectively.

Metrics

Metrics constitute direct measurements of system performance, offering real-time insights into various parameters like CPU loads or database write times. Unlike logs and traces, which provide detailed narratives, metrics provide quantitative data that is crucial for assessing the overall health and efficiency of a system. Tracking metrics enables timely responses to fluctuations in system behavior, contributing to proactive system management.

Traces

Traces can be understood as a coherent record of an individual transaction’s journey as it progresses through the entire technology stack. This stitched-up account allows for a holistic view of how a transaction moves through different components and services. Traces are particularly valuable for understanding the flow and interactions within a system, aiding in the identification of bottlenecks or inefficiencies.

States of Journey Observability

The Journey Observability view categorizes the overall state of a journey into three key states:

1. Impacted State:
   
   • Indicates a journey in an unstable state.
   • Pinpoints affected lead indicators, touchpoints, and golden signals.
   • Essential for focused troubleshooting and resolution.
2. Early Warning State:
   
   • Indicates early signs of instability without impacting the end-user experience.
   • Enables proactive actions to prevent potential issues from escalating.
3. Ideal State:
   
   • Represents an efficient and effective journey.
   • All lead indicators and touchpoints are stable.
   • The desired outcome for positive user experience and operational excellence.

Business Journey Observability

A Business Journey denotes the pathway of either a financial or non-financial request initiated by an external source. Business Journey Observability focuses on observing critical business processes, identifying bottlenecks, and optimizing them for efficiency.

Key Characteristics of Business Journey Observability include:

• Specific path involving all or a subset of touchpoints.
• Lead indicators are shown at an aggregate level based on transaction logs.
• End-to-end journey visibility at the individual transaction level.
• Captures errors, exceptions, and key metrics for all transaction requests.

The 3T correlation approach, encompassing correlations across time, transaction topology, and transaction IDs, enables comprehensive end-to-end visibility in near real-time. This approach empowers IT, Operations, and Business teams to make data-driven decisions, enhance user experiences, and continuously optimize business operations.

Example: An Instant Payments Business Journey originating from the payment switch going through multiple touchpoints/applications and terminating at CBS.

Business Journey – Hierarchy

The business journey hierarchy consists of four fixed levels, providing a structured approach to understanding and optimizing end-to-end processes.

Unified Transaction Map (UTM)

At the heart of Business Journey Observability is the Unified Transaction Map (UTM), an exclusive feature of the vuSmartMaps platform. The UTM provides a unified, consolidated, and visual representation of all Applications/Microservices and their interactions within your business journey. This powerful birds-eye view visualization aids in  Identifying the application and its MELT (Metrics, Events, Logs, and Traces) signals that significantly contribute to user experience degradation in the end-to-end business journey workflows. It enables the swift identification and resolution of incidents, minimizing downtime, and enhancing overall operational efficiency.

The UTM in incident resolution offers a clear and comprehensive view of the business journey. This facilitates quick identification of issues and accelerates the resolution process, ultimately reducing the impact on business operations.

Here’s an example of the Unified Transaction Map (UTM) showcasing the Internet and Mobile Banking Business Journey. This illustration highlights the diverse touchpoints involved, providing a visual representation of the state and metrics across all touchpoints and their interconnections.

Key Features

• Journey Tracking: VuNet’s Business Journey Observability meticulously tracks both sync and async transactions within the business workflow. It provides sequential insights into each process stage, facilitating the detection of micro-legs that may contribute to performance degradation.
• API Performance Tracking: vuSmartMaps observes the requests and responses of specific APIs, even when they are integrated in async mode. It can identify APIs that significantly contribute to failures and high response times, even if the API response time is high at the partner’s endpoint. This capability helps determine if customer experience issues are due to problems in your data center or other third-party application providers
• Business Performance Insights: Incorporating the business context, vuSmartMaps provides real-time insights into business journey performance through Business Lead Indicators. It helps to identify whether a failure occurred in Financial or Non-Financial transactions. In the case of financial transactions involving multiple parties’ applications, we can pinpoint and display the entity responsible for the failure This ensures the swift identification and resolution of any deviations from the expected outcomes. The insights can be filtered by channel, API, or ecosystem partner (Merchant, Issuer Bank, Regulator).
• Performance By Slice and Dice: vuSmartMaps provides a multidimensional view with dynamic, filterable features.

Further Reading

1. Configuring a Business Journey: Learn how to set up and configure the business journey observability with VuNet.
2. Insights from Logs, Metrics, and Traces: Dive deeper into the comprehensive observability offered by vuSmartMaps through logs, metrics, and traces.