As a European specialist in wholesale securities services, an independent bank that connects financial institutions both within Europe and across the globe and that, moreover, serves pension funds, insurers, asset managers, banks, brokers, and investment companies from offices in Amsterdam, London, and Wiesbaden, KAS BANK is very aware of the need to understand exactly what a given set of data is saying. In this context, KAS BANK was exploring ways to improve the monitoring of its applications and databases.
As Arjan van Rees, one of the specialists responsible for IT infrastructure management at KAS BANK explained:
As Arjan van Rees, one of the specialists responsible for IT infrastructure management at KAS BANK explained:
“The system we had told us when something was wrong but didn’t specify the cause. We’d have to report an error or a failure to the DBA, who would then have to trace the cause through what was effectively a manual procedure before taking the necessary corrective action.”
Because the level of monitoring provided by the OpsLogix Oracle® Intelligent Management Pack (IMP) is, in the words of Van Rees, “quite deep,” it is no longer necessary to ask the DBA, the database administrator, to trace the cause. The IMP indicates the status of each file in the database. It is therefore immediately apparent if a given file is out of sequence or if there are issues in terms of space, for example. This greatly improved ability to identify the “why” means significantly less work for both applications managers and database administrators. Moreover, enhanced data-related transparency and situational awareness do not come at the cost of security, since the IMP makes it possible to define the rights and authorizations associated with a specific user profile.
According to Van Rees, first impressions of the IMP were:
According to Van Rees, first impressions of the IMP were:
“Very good. It is very easy to install and it worked right away.”
Since it will be used in a distributed application environment, the IMP is currently (March 2012) undergoing final testing at KAS BANK. Van Rees expects this process to be completed in a couple of weeks, after which KAS BANK will at all times be aware of the whats and whys of its Oracle databases.