Customer Background

Our customer is a private retail establishment with departmental stores located in multiple states of the US and has a growing digital presence. They offer a wide assortment of national brands and private label fashion apparel, shoes, and accessories for entire family along with top name cosmetics, wedding registry, and a large selection of quality merchandise for home.

Technology Scope

The following products and technologies were used in this effort by our team and the customer,

• IBM Integration Bus (IIB)
• IBM MQ
• IBM DataPower
• Oracle 11g
• IBM DB2
• IBM Data Stage
• IBM Quality Stage

The Business Requirement

With increasing business in A (high-sale) and B (moderate-sale) days of November and December, our customer is in the process of expecting continuous support in monitoring and closing large volumes of transactions with high throughput without any impediments in the following areas.

• ESB (Enterprise Service Bus)
• ETL (Extract, Transform and Load)
• DBA (Database Administration)

Our Solution and Support

Miracle's Integration and DBA Team partnered with the customer to follow the below Holiday Readiness Approach for the systems.

Prepare

Our team prepared a complete structure by examining all the customer requirements.

• Assess readiness for critical applications and integrations in terms of performance, capacity, and monitoring and alerting
• Initiatives to prepare staff and continuously monitor, so as to ensure that the teams understand the technical design and end-to-end process for critical applications and integrations
• Increased awareness to key activities and timelines
• Reinforced staffing availability throughout the key dates
• Round the clock management coverage
• Escalation of matrix and procedures

Monitor

Our team providing critical monitoring efforts to ensure that the systems were available and healthy during the required peak periods.

• Health checks covering all critical applications done every day for integration systems, databases and ETL processes
• We have required technical teams for issue resolution if any abnormality reported as high severity tickets
• Proactively check status of critical applications and initiate recovery steps immediately when any anomaly observed

Act

When needed the team jumped in to act on any anomalies using the following approach and asking the below questions,

• What is the problem? What time did it happen? What scenario is captured in logs? Can it be reproduced or recreated?
• What maintenance is applied in the environment? (Meantime fixes, Patches, etc.)
• What you have already done to try to troubleshoot or resolve the issue?
• Does it work on other environments? What is different between environments? (Logic/Code/Data)
• What has been changed? Any recent data loads, upgrades, promotions, or traffic increase that could contribute

Report

All monitoring activities and resolution activities were completely cross checked and reported to the business.

• Communication plans - All key stakeholders kept up to date with also maintaining regular status emails
• Daily health check status to be published
• Weekly report on the past week performance and lessons learnt

Customer Benefits

With the best expertise and 24x7 support provided during the holiday season customer was able to sail through the peak sale days with utmost ease.

• With a robust support structure and efficient SMEs, customer was able to achieve very minimal down times resulting in a higher throughput for orders resulting in bigger sales
• Round the clock support both at onsite and offshore to deal with any potential bottlenecks and provided the solutions with minimal turnaround
• There was an extensive sweep and fix of the existing issues before the holiday freeze period has started, which helped the customer achieve bugfree implementation and smooth flow of orders across the systems
• The issue handling and escalation methodologies are now streamlined allowing the customer to focus more on the other business areas