This article is based on extensive collaboration with banks across Switzerland, Austria, and Germany — drawing from in-depth workshops, proof of concepts, and strategic discussions with amasol Observability consultants. It highlights why financial institutions are rethinking their Observability strategies to achieve operational excellence across all teams.
In an era where digital speed defines customer trust, banks face a mounting challenge: ensuring the reliability of hundreds of interconnected applications, systems, and services — all while reducing manual overhead, staying agile and adapting to ever-evolving regulatory requirements.
For a forward-looking financial institution, the solution is clear: it’s time to unify Observability, consolidate tools, and automate the noise away.
The modern bank’s monitoring dilemma
Behind every digital banking experience lies a complex web of technologies — from containerized platforms to cloud infrastructure, hybrid applications, and a diverse stack of monitoring tools. In this environment, it’s all too common for metrics, logs, traces, and infrastructure monitoring to live in isolated silos.
Engineers are juggling multiple dashboards, tools that don’t integrate well, and alert floods that make it difficult to detect what really matters. Meanwhile, business and product teams struggle to get a real-time view of performance and service health.
The result? Slow incident response, reactive decision-making, and too many hours spent doing work that should be automated.
A bold strategy: one platform, less noise, more insight
To regain control and clarity, banks must set a strategic goal: consolidate monitoring into a single, integrated Observability platform and eliminate as much manual effort as possible through intelligent automation and tool consolidation.
The benefits of this transformation are wide-reaching:
• Centralized Observability across infrastructure, applications, and business services.
• Automated incident creation and resolution, reducing dependency on manual triage.
• Unified dashboards that connect technical health with business impact.
• Alert noise suppression and smarter correlation to surface real problems faster.
• Reduced overhead through smart tool consolidation, lowering both complexity and operational cost.
• Consistent, end-to-end infrastructure monitoring to ensure foundational systems are healthy and visible.
This is more than a tech refresh — it’s a shift in mindset from “monitoring everything” to observing what matters most.
Key challenges on the journey
While the destination is clear, the path to get there isn’t without obstacles:
• Tool fragmentation has led to inconsistent monitoring coverage and duplicated effort.
• Alert fatigue slows down teams and obscures true root causes.
• Legacy applications and vendor-provided systems limit visibility and control, yet remain essential due to their stability, integration depth, or regulatory necessity.
• Manual incident workflows create delays in response and resolution.
Different teams — infrastructure, application, and business — each have unique needs, which adds further complexity. Bridging these perspectives requires a platform that delivers both depth and simplicity — and benefits from intentional tool consolidation and unified infrastructure monitoring.
Not to forget – Compliance with banking regulations requiring consistent monitoring standards, transparent reporting, and traceable incident handling — even across legacy and third-party systems.
A vision for Unified Observability
The ideal platform goes beyond basic monitoring. It integrates with existing tools for metrics, logs, traces, and infrastructure health; correlates alerts automatically; and gives every stakeholder a view that makes sense for their role.
Key capabilities include:
• Automated ticket handling with dynamic routing and resolution in the incident management tool.
• Real-time dashboards showing KPIs, application behavior, infrastructure status, and system health — all in one place.
• Support for containerized, legacy, and third-party apps, regardless of how they’re built or deployed.
• Predictive monitoring and synthetic testing to spot issues before they affect users.
• A simplified ecosystem enabled by tool consolidation — fewer systems, better integration, and improved visibility.
• Deep infrastructure monitoring that links server health to application behavior and end-user impact.
This is Observability not just as a toolset, but as a strategic enabler of operational excellence.
Building a smarter bank
In the fast-moving world of digital finance, staying ahead means seeing clearly — and acting quickly. A unified Observability platform gives teams the confidence to respond faster, understand deeper, and automate smarter.
By investing in this transformation and committing to tool consolidation and robust infrastructure monitoring, a bank is doing more than improving uptime. It’s building a foundation for continuous innovation, better customer experiences, and resilient growth – while addressing the added complexity of regulations and maintaining critical legacy systems.
And perhaps most importantly, it’s turning complexity into clarity — one smart alert at a time.
How Dynatrace accelerates the vision
To bring this Observability strategy to life, banks are adopting advanced platforms that address the exact challenges described above. Here’s how a unified solution helps overcome them:
Unify Observability across tools
• Dynatrace combines data from the infrastructure monitoring tool, metrics platform, dashboarding tools, and incident management tool into a single pane of glass
• Eliminates the need to jump between disconnected systems
Automated Alert Correlation & Root Cause Analysis
• AI-powered analysis rapidly identifies root causes across the stack
• Smart alert grouping and suppression cut down on noise and fatigue
Seamless integration with Incident Management
• Automatically triggers and closes incidents based on live monitoring events
• Streamlines workflows and reduces manual input from operators
Full-stack & business visibility
• Connects infrastructure health with application flows and business KPIs
• Enables end-to-end tracing across containers, virtual appliances, and legacy systems
• Supports both in-house and vendor-supplied applications
Native Support for container platforms
• Provides deep visibility into nodes, pods, and services
• Optimized for platforms like OpenShift and Kubernetes, regardless of workload type
Quantified results from real-world deployments
• Up to 90% faster mean time to repair (MTTR) using automated root cause analysis
• Up to 80% improvement in resolution time through intelligent correlation
• Case in point: One global payments provider reduced MTTR from weeks to hours by streamlining collaboration and unifying monitoring workflows
Strategic value across the organization
• Infrastructure teams: Faster resolution, optimized alerting, improved uptime
• Dev & SRE teams: end-to-end visibility for efficient debugging and release validation
• Business stakeholders: Dashboards that clearly link system health to customer experience and business KPIs
• The organization as a whole: Tool consolidation, lower total cost of ownership, better cost/income ratio and a shared operational language across teams – all while navigating regulatory expectations and managing legacy platforms.
If the insights from this article align with your operational & strategic challenges, we would be pleased to initiate a conversation and explore potential synergies.
Please don’t hesitate to contact us at amasol.
About the author
Niklaus Wiederkehr
Niklaus Wiederkehr is a Senior Account Executive at amasol GmbH in Zurich and specializes in digitization and transformation projects in the banking sector in the DACH region.
With many years of experience in the digital environment, he has in-depth expertise in the areas of digital analytics, customer journey & touchpoints, and strategic digital transformation.
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