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VuNet’s vuOTT – The Future of Observability

Revolutionize your business journey with VuNet’s vuOTT framework – the ultimate solution for deep observability inside, transparency outside, and traceability across all your transactions. The vuOTT framework is powered by VuNet’s AI-led business journey observability platform vuSmartMaps™. Monitoring more than 9 billion transactions a month, it is trusted by leading banks, regulators, and payment gateways. 

Introduction

The rise of multi-party API transactions has made it difficult for enterprises to manage the complexity and multiple failure points that come with it, putting customer experience at risk. Enterprises need to reduce failure rates, improve turnaround times, and ensure smooth user experience. However, the increasing dependence on cloud deployments and multiple third-party APIs and services has created a new problem: that of monitoring these interactions with multiple partners and stakeholders.

As digital-first businesses continue to grow, the environments they operate in will become more complex and heterogeneous. Enterprises are reliant on third-party APIs while also being accountable for their own services used by external parties. For example, a bank may rely on an external API to complete a lending workflow and expose its own APIs to regulators, aggregators, and merchants. These APIs, business services, and infrastructural components need to work in unison with high resiliency and provide all connected partners a real-time view of the ecosystem. To achieve this, the Business, DevOps, Operations and Product Support teams must have a common view of the system through Unified Observability.

Moreover, given the inherent nature of the complexity of a user transaction moving across multiple entities and factoring in the mix of synchronous and asynchronous transactions, it is increasingly difficult to trace and track every single transaction and to know at what stage a failure (if any) occurred. This manifests in business challenges, when customer complaints flood social media and call centers. Support teams need deeper views into every single transaction, for everything from pacifying irate customers to suggesting the next set of actions.

In summary, a multi part API Rails system is a beauty from the outside but a  complex beast from the inside, not just to make things work but also monitor, observe and manage. The UPI system is just one such example of a complex API system on Rails, working at an 8-billion-transactions-a-month scale. But for many to replicate this success story, a new paradigm of observing such systems is required to bring in more transparency and trust.

It is in this context that VuNet, through its ground-up built Business Journey Observability platform, provides the North Star for the digital-first enterprise, in creating a more holistic  framework to solve the Observability challenges for the new age API-driven world. We present the vuOTT framework, which is a unique as well as simple framework for end-to-end, intelligent Business Journey Observability that provides Deep Observability inside(O), Transparency outside(T) and Traceability across(T).

vuOTT as a Driver of Unified Observability

The following infographic explains the concept of O-T-T.

Deep Observability Inside entails the transition from monitoring to Unified Observability to Business Journey Observability to AIOps and Automation. Logs and metrics need to be collectable from every component of the infrastructure, and the logs must have sufficient granularity of error messages or responses returned by API gateways of external systems. High cardinality of logs, metrics, and lead indicators on traces are the other aspects to consider during data collection and ingestion. This mandates the adoption of better logging practices and DevOps for embedded observability via Open Logging, Open Telemetry and other standards implemented across the board.

In the interconnected digital enterprise, a “black-box” API that is difficult to debug and understand hinders the ability to view a trace in its entirety, which in turn affects the ability of ITOM teams to troubleshoot issues at a transaction level, as well as the availability of data for rendering BizOps dashboards to perform drilldowns based on the health of the enterprise’s and partners’ APIs, and various business and IT error codes. Hence the need for Transparency Outside, enabling the enterprise to provide real-time views into its partner ecosystem. By establishing a clearly defined contract based on mutual trust and well-documented method signatures at every internal and external API interface, the enterprise can promote transparent interactions between integration partners. Additionally, APIs and microservices should clearly state which data points are being exposed to facilitate troubleshooting, thereby promoting the concept of Transparency Outside.

With complex heterogeneous environments, every transaction traverses multiple touchpoints across disparate infrastructures – some internal, some external. In addition, infrastructure level metrics also need to be collected from external elements like payment switches, network switches and storage devices. This has a direct bearing on the visibility we have into the IT and business metrics of the journey. Interactions in multi-party systems are not always observable, which means that there might be some steps in a transaction we are unable to trace. This leads to the question: When there is a dispute or a customer complaint, how can the ID of a specific transaction in question be traced? How can better interconnection be facilitated across disparate entities to identify failure points? How can every micro-leg of a transaction be traced without compromising on privacy considerations? This is why Traceability Across is required.

vuOTT enables further evolution towards Business Journey Observability by collecting all the data points necessary for end-to-end visibility at a journey-level, thereby unifying all the eco-system stakeholders (internal and external) in the single pane of glass.

Why vuOTT is a Gamechanger

How vuOTT enables the salient use cases for different personas within an organization and can be summarized as follows:

1. Deep Observability Inside: ITOps and DevOps teams can view journey correlations across touchpoints on a single pane of glass, eliminating the need for multiple tools for different purposes and multiple dashboards for troubleshooting and root cause analysis. By drilling down on each touchpoint and micro-leg of the journey, it is possible to view the latency, anomalous golden signals, and any IT/business errors, enabling faster and more accurate incident detection and root cause analysis. This also allows for auto-remediation of issues through the integration of automation solutions, reducing MTTD and MTTR and ultimately reducing downtime.

2. Transparency Outside: Business leaders, partners and regulators can use custom operational dashboards to view failure rates, latency, transaction volumes, and IT/business errors on transactions. This allows them to make informed business decisions and determine compliance, incentives, or penalties as necessary. Channel partners gain insight into which services are causing business or technical errors, and can determine how to better handle them. Business leaders can make informed decisions on whether to switch partners or throttle transactions to a particular API or microservice based on latency and failures (e.g.: scaling an API which is seeing an exponential growth in number of transactions accessing it, or returning a more meaningful error message upon authentication failure, so a user can attempt transacting again).

3. Traceability Across: Customer support teams, dispute handlers and compliance teams can pinpoint problematic steps of a transaction by searching on a customer ID or any unique identifier for the transaction in question and analyzing the associated journey attributes. This makes it possible to isolate failure points and underlying reasons, and extrapolate that data for compliance reporting (for instance, all transactions in a particular geo-location facing latency) or incident investigation (for instance, failure of high value transactions).

Conclusion

Mere monitoring and observability are not enough in an interconnected digital-first enterprise. The vuOTT framework is a key pillar for digital transformation, as it enables teams across the board to have a unified and real-time view of the payment infrastructure. It facilitates the real-time visibility of interactions with multiple partners and stakeholders, ensuring that business transactions are always Observable Inside, Transparent Outside and Traceable Across.

So say goodbye to blind spots and embrace the future of transaction monitoring with VuNet’s vuOTT framework!

In our next blog of the series, we will talk more about how the vuOTT framework is accelerated through our vuSmartMaps™ platform, with a focus on Business Journey Observability. To know more about how your organization can achieve the Observability-Traceability-Transparency triad with the help of vuOTT, contact us at [email protected]

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