Operational Reliability

Case studies show how EDMS supports operational reliability by employing techniques such as analyzing trends, running environmental health checks, detecting performance degradation, and monitoring data quality.

Proactive prevention using trend analysis

Third-party security and monitoring software installed in a customer production environment resulted in a delayed response time. For the non-EDMS customer, the response time increased for weeks, until it resulted in a catastrophic outage. For the EDMS customer, ARGO specialists detected the issue through trend analysis and mitigated the issue before users were impacted.

Environment health check

An external event resulted in a production server issue. For the non-EDMS customer, this led to a significant user outage caused by transaction timeouts. For the EDMS customer, ARGO specialists detected the issue during the first morning health check and resolved the issue before it impacted users.

React and recover

An issue originating in the relational database caused performance degradation and timeouts in the production environment. This issue occurred without warning and could not have been predicted. For the non-EDMS customer, the issue was handed off from the users to the support help desk, to the IT department, who reported the issue to ARGO support. For the EDMS customer, ARGO specialists detected the issue and quickly reacted to isolate it and initiate the recovery process.

Host performance degradation

EDMS detected degraded mainframe host performance through weekly trend analysis. At a transactional level, the team saw functions such as customer searches taking up to 50% longer. Because EDMS pinpointed the exact day and time when performance started degrading, the customer was able to find two changes made around this time—one to the middleware and one to the host—and take action. Based on historical information, it could have taken a non-EDMS customer up to six months to identify the issue due to the inability to identify the day and time performance degradation started. This could lead to significant user impacts and complaints as well as potential outages. Actual support cases for similarly-sized customers provide a basis for projecting non-EDMS customer statistics.

Performance degradation by third-party software

Updating third-party cybersecurity software on servers caused automated tasks – sending of adverse action letters and generating real-time forms – to be delayed or time out. Tasks normally completed in 30 seconds did not finish and timed out after two to three minutes. For this EDMS customer, the ARGO team caught the issue on the first day, enabling the bank to immediately make changes to improve performance and avoid regulatory compliance issues. For the non-EDMS customer, the response times would continue to increase for weeks resulting in an outage and a backlog of mandated notices, followed by possible compliance violations and fines. Actual support cases for similarly-sized customers provide a basis for projecting non-EDMS customer statistics.

Data quality monitoring

EDMS monitors data quality to ensure analytical and functional systems operate efficiently and accurately. Each month, ARGO measures and trends data quality issues, such as potential overlays, duplicates, or overlapping source system records in its EMPI solution. In this case, disparate data sources contributing patient records exceeded the ARGO data quality threshold for potential duplicate rates. ARGO identified the offending sources and provided cleanup tasks to remove the inaccurate records.