Natexis Banques Populaires Chooses Sysload to Monitor its IT Infrastructure

The Sysload Solution Provides All Required IT System Monitoring Capabilities - Unified and Integrated - for Natexis Banques Populaires

A commercial and investment bank, Natexis Banques Populaires is the publicly traded entity of the Groupe Banques Populaires holding company.

Created in January 1999 from the combination of Natexis SA and Caisse Centrale des Banques Populaires, the corporation represents the for-profit component of the holding company with 7,000 employees worldwide.

Natexis Banques Populaires has diverse and complementary expertise allowing it to add value to its traditional banking practices through high-tech activities that give the bank a unique status in the world of banking.

The business operations, whether carried out directly by Natexis Banques Populaires or through its affiliates, are organized into six divisions centered on three major business areas:

• Financing (Banking Activity and Specialized Financing)
• Investment (Market Activity and Investment Capital)
• Service (Banking, Financial, Technology and Trust Services)

The IT services for Natexis Banques Populaires is divided into two groups: Financial Services Centers, comprised of 700 staff distributed over various IT sites in Paris, and IT Infrastructure and Production, consisting of 350 employees located in Charenton.

The Charenton server facility contains 600 production servers supporting the IT needs for Natexis Banques Populaires, its affiliates as well as its clients.

Paul Cusin is the Distributed Systems Director for IT Infrastructure and Production. Ensuring the reliability and performance of all distributed servers is his primary responsibility.

A Single Solution for Heterogeneous Environments

The Groupe Banques Populaires wanted to consolidate its financial services and IT activities in a single business unit. As a result, the number of servers was growing rapidly. It was therefore critical to be able to efficiently maintain and monitor all servers together.

"To enable our company to focus on its core business, it was becoming necessary to monitor our IT systems and databases. We needed to master the critical aspects of all of our servers while ensuring their availability." explains Cusin.

Faced with the heterogeneous infrastructure of AIX, SCO, Solaris, VMS, Linux, NT, NetWare, and OS/400 servers, Natexis Banques Populaires needed to select a system that was capable of easy integration with different environments.

In response, the IT team set out to find a program that was up to the task of providing a homogeneous monitoring solution.

Transparent Monitoring to Optimize and Measure System Capacity

After studying various solutions on the market, Natexis Banques Populaires went with the recommendations from Altaïr, its technology affiliate in charge of distributed systems. The affiliate recommended the use of a comprehensive monitoring solution that would consume few resources. The Sysload solution met the requirements precisely because it offered distributed binary agents and allowed for immediate deployment without any change to the installation.

"We chose Sysload because of its ease of installation and use, the accuracy and extent of its metrics, the broad scope of its functionality and, most importantly, its low CPU resource consumption." notes Cusin.
Natexis Banques Populaires deployed the Sysload solution across its entire bank of production servers. 500 Sysload agents were installed to ensure the complete monitoring of system activity.

"Deployment took place very quickly because the Sysload agents are installed and configured in a few minutes," Cusin adds.

For Natexis Banques Populaires, Sysload is an indispensable tool for monitoring server activity and detecting problems 24/7. In a few seconds, Sysload analyzes quantities of information that would be impossible with other methods. The solution also enables the internal distribution of the results.

Natexis Banques Populaires integrates Sysload data into its Intranet, optimizing communication among different IT teams.  “Using the report writer, data sent from Sysload agents is consolidated, rolled up and published to an HTML or paper report. This gives us an end-to-end view of our IT systems” underscores Cusin.

Today, Sysload is an integral component of the IT system at Natexis Banques Populaires.

Sysload, a Tool Enabling Analysis of the Past to Predict the Future

Sysload meets Natexis Banques Populaires' expectations. It allows for the efficient understanding and management of an enterprise system's historical activity. Sysload can describe the state of a hardware box at a given moment, over the course of a month, a day, or five minutes, and can therefore identify recurring problems.
Thanks to Sysload's operational reports, Natexis Banques Populaires can identify trends and anticipate future infrastructure needs based on solid facts.

Without monitoring, an incident could have serious consequences for the bank. Paul Cusin states: “With certain mission critical applications, the monitoring that Sysload provides allows us to anticipate problems, and in the worst cases, to deal immediately with their resolution as soon as the first calls from users come in. Thus, we avoid any harmful impact on our business.”
Natexis Banques Populaires has recommended Sysload to all of its French and foreign affiliates. These affiliates are currently free to select their own monitoring tools, but a common standard is in the works.

The Sysload solution has become a must-have tool for operating the IT infrastructure at Natexis Banques Populaires. “We use Sysload on a massive scale. Thanks to Sysload, we can better manage our IT system. We consider it an excellent solution, one that allows us to drive the system, conduct capacity planning, and meet our needs” Paul Cusin concludes.