Quick bullets:

• Interruption of services of a major bank is a disaster for the clients and partners
• Learning about incident from customers is bad for reputation
• Modern APM tools allow proactive approach, end-user experience monitoring and prompt resolutions of incidents

Summary:

Customers of Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) were really frustrated on April 15 with a massive services interruption. Clients were unable to access theire accounts for several hours, merchants were unable to process credit cards, and CBA financial trading platform (CommSec) was unavailable for traders. All of this was caused by a hardware failure of one switch, according to internal sources.

Aside from direct financial impact, this incident hit hard CBA reputation. One of the main reason was the bank learned about the situation from its own customers. And while problem invistigation and isolation was in process, clients were venting their frustration in the social networks and on Twitter.

Situation would be different if CBA used modern application performance monitoring, with its end-user experience monitoring and root-cause analysis features. Especially since CBA already experienced major incidents in the past, and just recently invested 1 billion USD in core banking system upgrade.

For the full story read our article(in russian).