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Overview

Saxo Bank optimizes online trading and investment platform with Dynatrace

Saxo headquarters 3 300dpi
Dynatrace was the obvious solution, as its AI capabilities turn data into answers that point us at where to look, and what to look for.
Thomas Ulrich
Global Head of Infrastructure & Workplace Technology, Saxo Bank

About Saxo Bank

  • Danish bank specializing in online trading and investment
  • $20bn daily average trading volume
  • 810,000 clients in 180 countries
  • Founded in 1992, headquartered in Copenhagen

Industry

  • Financial Services

Story Snapshot

Reduced MTTR
Identify and resolve issues 50% faster
Smarter observability
Quicker and more successful deployments
Improved trading platform
Real-time insights into service availability
Streamlined alerts
Suppressed noise with an all-in-one solution

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Going cloud-native to build a modern platform

Saxo Bank wanted to offer a market-leading trading platform that best supports the needs of individual investors as well as white-label partners, such as banks and management firms. Its platform connects to global stock markets in London, New York, and Tokyo, handling more than 800,000 different prices per second. Availability and reliability are critical to the success of the platform, due to the fast paced nature of the investment and trading market.

To enable the high speed, low latency its platform needed, Saxo Bank built a fully on-premises IT stack, running on Multicast and Windows technology. More recently, to drive greater digital agility, it began to migrate towards a microservices and containerized architecture on Microsoft Azure Kubernetes Stack (AKS), in an on-premises private cloud. This brought significant complexity to its environment. To overcome this, the bank needed a single solution that could monitor across all technologies, reduce alert storms, and cut resolution times.

Turning data into answers for better incident management

Saxo Bank turned to Dynatrace for end-to-end, intelligent observability across its entire environment. Dynatrace’s all-in-one solution streamlines incident management, by providing instant and precise answers when problems arise. This would prevent the bank’s teams from feeling overwhelmed by the storms of up to 1.5 million alerts they receive from legacy monitoring solutions every month. Dynatrace also offered Saxo Bank an outside-in view, so teams could identify if and how an issue affected users, helping them determine the significance of an issue and be more proactive in its customer support, particularly for its VIP clients.

“The availability of our platform is crucial, because it only takes a few seconds of downtime to create a huge risk for us and our customers,” said Thomas Ulrich, Global Head of Infrastructure & Workplace Technology at Saxo Bank. “To manage that risk, we collect large volumes of data on the performance of our platform, but it previously lacked context. As a result, we struggled to make sense of it quickly enough to act and prevent issues impacting our platform. Dynatrace was the obvious solution, as its AI capabilities turn data into answers that point us at where to look, and what to look for.”

Dynatrace was the obvious solution, as its AI capabilities turn data into answers that point us at where to look, and what to look for.
Thomas Ulrich
Global Head of Infrastructure & Workplace Technology, Saxo Bank

Life with Dynatrace

  • Faster investment and trading innovation – Insights from Dynatrace enable Saxo Bank to catch any performance degradation earlier in the production lifecycle, helping its platform developers deploy faster and more successfully. Dynatrace’s AI capabilities also allow teams to identify root cause of any problems immediately, resulting in shorter resolution times.
  • Reduced alert noise – Dynatrace consolidates notifications, suppressing alert noise and enabling teams to identify the answers they need to resolve problems quickly. Teams no longer need to manage multiple monitoring tools and waste time troubleshooting issues and triaging, freeing them up to focus on more productive tasks and innovation.
  • Streamlined incident management – Saxo Bank has integrated Dynatrace with ServiceNow to support incident management processes. Dynatrace senses any deviations from the norm in the performance of Saxo Bank’s platform, links symptoms and root cause into a single notification, then pipes it into a ServiceNow ticket for a relevant team to pick up and action. By ensuring the right teams have access to all key information about an issue, including business impact, Saxo Bank has boosted its efficiency and reduced mean time to resolution (MTTR) by 50%.
  • Improved customer support – Dynatrace equips Saxo Bank’s customer service teams with precise answers about any issues its platform is experiencing in real-time, enabling them to better support clients. Previously, if a client contacted customer support with a problem, the team would need to bring in a developer and the issue might have taken several days to resolve. Now, teams can access all information through Dynatrace and resolve issues in hours or even minutes.

“Dynatrace is transforming the way we work and guarantees the performance and availability of our platform,” says Ulrich. “We’ve been able to eliminate manual processes and time-consuming triage efforts, freeing up more time for our developers to focus on innovation and enhancing our platform. We’re also able to be much more proactive. Dynatrace automatically spots issues at a very early stage, so we can predict and prevent problems from impacting our platform and clients. We have improved our IT operation notably by introducing Dynatrace.”

Dynatrace automatically spots issues at a very early stage, so we can predict and prevent problems from impacting our platform and clients. We have improved our IT operation notably by introducing Dynatrace.
Thomas Ulrich
Global Head of Infrastructure & Workplace Technology, Saxo Bank

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