First National Bank of Omaha Delivers Community-Centric Banking Experiences With Dynatrace

First National Bank of Omaha (FNBO) is known as the ‘great big small bank’ owing to its roots as a local community bank in Omaha, Nebraska, and in small towns across the Great Plains, which has grown to become one of the largest in the U.S. FNBO’s digital strategy is designed to preserve its close community centric relationships with customers, by delivering reliable online banking services that meet their needs wherever they may be. To support this, FNBO is in the process of modernizing and streamlining the infrastructure that supports its digital services, by transitioning to Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS).

Managing and monitoring this evolving cloud-native environment posed new challenges for FNBO due to the pace, scale, and frequency of change. Previously, teams relied on manually extracting data from a log monitoring solution to understand the cause of any issues that arose. This was cumbersome and frustrating, with high overhead costs. FNBO needed a more automated, unified approach to observability that was better suited to a cloud-native architecture and could give its teams all the end-to-end insights they needed in a single platform.

FNBO evaluated its existing approach against Dynatrace’s unified observability and security platform, and another competing solution. Dynatrace emerged as the clear victor and best suited to FNBO’s new cloud-native architecture, due to the platform’s comprehensive observability, intuitive user interface, and high level of automation. With the cost savings achieved by consolidating multiple monitoring tools to Dynatrace, FNBO was able to expand observability coverage to the mainframe, providing true end-to-end visibility.

“High availability and resiliency of our digital banking services is essential to building trust and strengthening relationships with our customers,” said Sean Kent, Senior Site Reliability Engineer for First National Bank of Omaha. “Dynatrace has reduced cloud complexity and saved time previously spent on manual log extraction and analysis. Now we can focus more on building flawless experiences for our customers. With Dynatrace, you don't have to go in and tell it what to do. It automatically instruments everything right out of the gate, and this has been transformative for the way our teams work.”

• Reduced costs: Phasing out its legacy log monitoring tool and consolidating to Dynatrace has unlocked significant cost savings for FNBO. The bank now relies on just one platform instead of several tools. Deploying Dynatrace in a SaaS model has also eliminated the need to maintain the infrastructure that was supporting FNBO’s legacy tool, delivering further savings.
• Greater efficiency: Previously up to 30 people were called into war room meetings when major issues arose. Dynatrace now acts as a single source of truth that provides automatic and continuous insight into FNBO’s entire technology stack, including precise answers about the cause of issues. This has helped minimize the number of team members needed to resolve problems, and also reduced the duration and need for war room calls significantly. FNBO often goes months without any major issues, or its teams meet to proactively optimize an issue before it impacts the customer, something that wasn’t possible before Dynatrace.
• Better experiences: Dynatrace provides unparalleled visibility into FNBO’s mainframe, enabling its teams to identify opportunities for modernizing applications, optimizing performance, and improving reliability. By joining the dots between the user experience and mainframe activity, FNBO has created a more seamless banking experience.
• Business impact: Now, with observability and business events data combined in the Dynatrace platform, FNBO can evaluate the impact of new digital services on the health of its business. For example, using business events data from logs alongside Dynatrace’s Query Language (DQL) and Notebooks, FNBO was able to visualize its loan origination by partner. This enabled the bank to make comparisons against projections made by the business, to identify the true impact of new partnerships on its revenue and growth.

“Dynatrace allows us to preempt and prevent problems, rather than having to crawl around under the house with a flashlight when the power goes out,” continues Kent. “When the mainframe team first saw the insights they could gain from Dynatrace, they were like kids in a candy store. It's wonderful being able to empower people like that. We’ve moved from a reactive to a proactive state, where we’re continuously improving our services and minimizing friction for our customers. That allows them to get on with their day with peace of mind that we’ll be there when they need us.”