Despite the adage, in the business world—ignorance is rarely bliss. In fact, what you don’t know, what you don’t see, can be fairly disruptive to your day-to-day operations and particularly painful to your bottom line. An unknown problem or inefficiency can lead to unnecessary delays, process missteps, erroneous data and all manner of frustration among your staff, partners and customers.
Finding ways to decipher these unknown issues was becoming a priority for IBM Business Partner Rebendo AB. A developer of performance management solutions, the firm specializes in creating customized, detailed dashboards that provide users with increased visibility into internal IT and network operations. And it had started recognizing a pattern among its clientele.
“We were seeing a new type of problem,” recalls Slobodan Djurdjevic, Founder and Owner of Rebendo. “We work with a lot of industries—car companies, public agencies, banks—but insurance companies, businesses that see high transaction levels, seemed the most common place for this challenge.”
“They would have an IT issue, but they wouldn’t know what was causing it,” adds Michael Kling, Chief Executive Officer at Rebendo. “Today’s IT business demands higher availability and faster development with a more flexible cloud sourcing strategy. For example, they would have a response time go up by 10 to 20 seconds, but they had no idea where the bottleneck was that was causing the delay. And for companies that deal with hundreds of thousands or even millions of transactions, a delay like that can cause many problems and bad will. And for maybe nine out of ten cases that we saw, the issue was not network application related.”
Recognizing an opportunity, Rebendo began putting together a new managed service that could deliver comprehensive, real-time monitoring of application processes and promote smoother operations.
Granular real-time insights
Rebendo Insight delivers real-time visibility at the granularity of 1 second
Improved efficiency
On average, the efficiency of the new solution keeps onsite oversight to < 1 day per week
And the company’s client base saw a clear opportunity for this new solution. “Real time is critical,” explains Jörgen Neij, Service and Solution Manager at Bankgirot, a customer of Rebendo for over a decade. “Real time is why we approached Rebendo originally. We are a clearing house and process something like eight million payments every day. To track that volume 24x7 can be a challenge, but real time is the only option.”
Djurdjevic picks up the story, continuing: “So we talked to Jörgen and our other customers. We asked them, ‘What would you like this solution to be? How would you like to see your monitoring area?’ And we quickly came to the decision that we needed this service to have its own portal where we could deliver total observability over everything in an IT environment, including any monitoring products already in place. We say: ‘Integrate what you have. Add what you need.’”
In early 2021, Rebendo launched its new service, Rebendo Insight—integrated with technology from Instana®, an IBM Company. The new solution provides users with a centralized management dashboard, while IBM Instana® Observability delivers the cloud engine that empowers users to observe, monitor and resolve application or service issues in real time.
“It was important to integrate Instana into Rebendo Insight because it would give us—and our customers—more options and let us be more predictive,” notes Kling. “We can now pull five different types of data sources into our offering. We can integrate other APM [application performance management] products that the customer already has, or whatever else they want to add. Whatever tools they want to use, there’s now only one place to look, and you can see everything with predictive ability.”
Alongside real-time monitoring, Rebendo Insight can also be used to validate the impact and success of new system changes or network applications. As Djurdjevic explains: “Before the user does a change, we can do a baseline that can be compared against the performance after the change. You can see if it’s made things better or worse, and that’s a big value for our customers.”
Beyond the centralized visibility into IT and network operations that Rebendo Insight delivers, the solution’s real-time monitoring promotes greater efficiencies and faster problem resolution. And the granularity of this insight—updating every second—has proven to be a key advantage compared to competing platforms.
“Some of our competitors,” notes Kling, “offer insight only once every 60 seconds. But that’s not what our users want. When we were building Rebendo Insight, we asked our customers about that level of granularity, and they told us, ‘Why would I use a product that doesn’t see 59 seconds of a minute? That’s a worthless product for me.’”
The new platform has also proven to be fairly intuitive for users, as Kling continues: “We have a tradition, a goal, that for every customer, we want to be their strategic advisor when they focus on predictability. With Rebendo Insight and Instana, we’ve built the platform for the next step in their automation journey together with IBM's AIOps [artificial intelligence for IT operations]. We can train the customer, we can help them set up the dashboard, and it’s not a burden on them or us. It’s very intuitive to use and easy to add in monitoring for different needs or different parts of the company.”
“It’s a very effective service,” concludes Djurdjevic. “We can set up and deploy everything quickly. We had a project in Stockholm where we were able to show the customer that we saved them two years and four months of setup time since they didn’t have to research and build everything by themselves. And that’s what we’re all about, making our customers more efficient.”
IBM Business Partner Rebendo (link resides outside of ibm.com) automated application performance monitoring capabilities offers performance management solutions and services. Founded in 2001, the business specializes in the creation of customized, detailed dashboards that can monitor and control the value of a user’s entire IT architecture. Rebendo is headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden and caters predominately to organizations in the Nordic market.
Legal
© Copyright IBM Corporation 2021. IBM Corporation, IBM Cloud, New Orchard Road, Armonk, NY 10504
Produced in the United States of America, September 2021.
IBM, the IBM logo, ibm.com, and Instana are trademarks of International Business Machines Corp., registered in many jurisdictions worldwide. Other product and service names might be trademarks of IBM or other companies. A current list of IBM trademarks is available on the web at “Copyright and trademark information” at ibm.com/legal/copyright-trademark.
This document is current as of the initial date of publication and may be changed by IBM at any time. Not all offerings are available in every country in which IBM operates.
The performance data and client examples cited are presented for illustrative purposes only. Actual performance results may vary depending on specific configurations and operating conditions. THE INFORMATION IN THIS DOCUMENT IS PROVIDED “AS IS” WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING WITHOUT ANY WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND ANY WARRANTY OR CONDITION OF NON-INFRINGEMENT. IBM products are warranted according to the terms and conditions of the agreements under which they are provided.
Rebendo Insight is not an IBM product or offering. Rebendo Insight is sold or licensed, as the case may be, to users under Rebendo AB’s terms and conditions, which are provided with the product or offering. Availability, and any and all warranties, services and support for Rebendo Insight, is the direct responsibility of, and is provided directly to users by, Rebendo AB.