Overview – Aiming for disruption-free banking through full-stack visibility

For Starling Bank, keeping IT systems up and running is core to doing business. The digital-first bank, which operates entirely online and has millions of customer accounts, offers access to personal, business, joint and multi-currency accounts from a single application. Any downtime is costly—in time, money and customers.

As a fast-growing organisation in the financial services industry, the bank must be able to detect and resolve issues across its IT environment quickly and efficiently. To that end, in 2018, the bank sought a way to trace requests—such as credit card requests from new customers—from start to finish. If a problem occurred, the bank wanted to be able to rapidly identify the original request, trace it through the system, pinpoint the issue and fix it.

Added value beyond end-to-end traceability with IBM Instana Observability

Starling Bank chose IBM Instana Observability not only for its tracing capabilities, but also to tap into its robust set of additional features in the future. The solution provides incident prevention with automated full-stack visibility, one-second data granularity, and three-second notification of errors. Its ease of use speeds up innovation by empowering engineers and others throughout the company to view, build and debug their own products.

During the implementation, the Starling Bank and IBM teams set up the solution to trace activity across the company’s multi-tenant environment, which includes 2,000 container pods spread over six Kubernetes clusters, as well as 800 services.

Outcomes – An investment in the future

With the solution successfully in place, the bank’s users are seeing the benefits, with employees able to pinpoint where things are broken when Starling has high request error rates.

To read about the full challenges faced and benefits produced with the implemented solution, you can read the full IBM Instana Observability case study with Starling Bank on IBM’s website.