Case Studies: Chapter 7 – Investment Brokerage

How an Investment Brokerage Firm Resolved a Spike in IT error messages within 24 hours

 

IT teams usually have many safeguards set up to alert them about bugs. What can be more challenging is understanding what leads to these errors. Here is a striking example from a US Investment Brokerage firm.

 

The Challenge: 47 error alerts within 1 minute

In the middle of one night, IT teams were alerted to 47 error instances from their site. What could be causing this?

 

Step 1: Identify the related website sessions

Coming into work in the morning, the team went through error logs to identify the related sessions. It turned out that all 47 errors were by one individual customer. 

 

Step 2: Replay the session

With their integration between the IT error logs and their session replay, the IT team was able to find and replay the session of that individual customer in the Experience Analytics. The replay is anonymous and does not include any text that the customer entered into the form.   

It turned out this customer tried to submit their application for the brokerage service 47 times within one minute. Each time, the form malfunctioned, causing the error alerts. 

 

Step 3: Identify the root cause and fix the problem

The DevOps team quickly identified the bug causing the error with the replay and error logs in hand. They resolved it that same day.

 

The moral of the story

Without session replay, an investigation to solve the mystery could have gone on for a lot longer. People, time, and effort would have been tied up unnecessarily when Experience Analytics could instead cut down the process much faster.