Mizuho Bank cuts incident response time and strengthens collaboration with IBM Instana Observability
Mizuho Bank, a pioneer in internet banking, serves millions of customers through their web and mobile platforms. As non-face-to-face channels became the norm, customer expectations for uninterrupted availability and seamless performance soared. However, the bank’s increasingly complex IT environment placed growing pressure on their small operations team tasked with maintaining an extensive, mission-critical infrastructure.
Typically monitoring tools only triggered alerts after issues occurred, leaving teams scrambling to investigate problems manually. With this reactive approach, identifying root causes and reporting on incidents often took three hours. Time-consuming reporting processes diverted attention from strategic development, while delays in resolution threatened customer satisfaction and trust. In the world of online banking—where system failures can be treated as social issues—Mizuho needed a proactive observability solution to prevent issues before they escalated so they could uphold their reputation for stability and reliability.
in incident response time from approximately 3 hours to 1 hour
in the time required for report creation
To modernize operations and reduce risk, Mizuho Bank collaborated with IBM to implement IBM Instana® Observability. The solution provided real-time visibility into system performance and application behavior, helping the teams at Mizuho detect and resolve issues before they impacted customers.
As Daiki Hagiwara of Mizuho’s Digital Channel IT Team explained, “With the release of the new internet banking system, we wanted to avoid failures and protect the service. That’s why we decided to adopt observability—to enable quick responses if anything happened.”
Mizuho chose IBM Instana for its rapid deployment capabilities—under five minutes per server—with minimal impact on existing systems and intuitive, easy-to-read dashboards accessible to both technical and nontechnical stakeholders. With strong support from IBM Consulting® and IBM® Technology Expert Labs, the bank integrated Instana during a major overhaul of their internet banking platform, Mizuho Direct.
The implementation gave IT teams at Mizuho Bank real-time insight into system health, performance slowdowns and transaction flows across multiple systems and platforms. The teams felt empowered to investigate and understand issues without needing to reproduce them in test environments or wait for log data. Custom dashboards in Instana simplified communication and reporting, especially during high-stakes periods such, as post-launch monitoring. By making performance data both accessible and actionable, the implementation of Instana fostered stronger collaboration between IT and business teams, helping Mizuho shift from reactive firefighting to proactive control.
After implementing IBM Instana Observability, Mizuho Bank achieved measurable improvements in operational efficiency, customer service and system resilience. The time required to investigate and report issues dropped by more than 65%, reducing incident response from approximately three hours to one. The time required for report creation was reduced by more than 50%, and the effort required for monitoring was also significantly minimized, thanks to the use of dashboards that provided shared visibility across both technical and business teams.
Kaori Iwasaki, Manager in the IT Division at Mizuho Research & Technologies, noted, “With Instana, we can now instantly see where slowdowns occur, what the problem is and how far the impact reaches—just at a glance. The speed of understanding the situation has greatly improved.”
Encouraged by these results, Mizuho began expanding Instana across additional systems and channels to unify observability across their IT landscape. Looking ahead, the bank plans to continue strengthening their internet banking infrastructure.
Mizuho Bank, Ltd. , one of Japan’s largest and most prominent financial institutions, offers a full range of banking services to individuals, corporations and institutions. As a core part of the Mizuho Financial Group, the bank plays a vital role in supporting Japan’s financial infrastructure and leads the way in digital banking innovation. With a strong focus on customer experience and operational excellence, Mizuho continues to invest in advanced technologies to deliver secured, seamless and reliable financial services across digital channels.
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