Bloomberg, the world’s most used and trusted provider of financial data and service, suffered widespread failure for about two and half hours on 17 April 2015 and turned the financial industry almost into a standstill.
This outage resulted in a delay of an USD4.5billion debt sale. The most significant consequence was that it pushed existing customer to consider alternatives to Bloomberg. Such thoughts were never on the minds of users till the day Bloomberg went down.
Bloomberg blamed the combination of hardware and software failures for the cause of the downtime.
Proper monitoring would have alerted the Bloomberg IT team of impending issues as symptoms, in the form of critical threshold crossed, would have appeared resulted as alerts to pre-empt of impending failure.
Long term customers of Bloomberg were not impressed with the outage, especially when they were not communicated about it.
Wrote ComputerWeekly.com
“Yann L’Huillier, CIO at inter-dealer broker Tradition – itself a Bloomberg customer – said that, even when Bloomberg got the system back up and running, it remained slow.
“L’Huillier said Bloomberg had given no explanation about what had happened and said he wanted to know how the company planned to prevent it happening again.
“I am surprised I have not been given an explanation, because we are a big customer.”
NetGain Systems Enterprise Manager v7 alerts IT teams of pending outage when elements within the device crosses certain pre-determined thresholds.
Threshold settings that can be set by you (CPU)
Threshold settings that can be set by you. (Memory)
When IT teams can be alerted of such symptoms, they can have more time to react them and probably solve the issues before it reaches the end users.
Alarms that show the critical level of each device/object
**Email/SMS alerting
Said Toh Soon Seah, CEO and Founder of NetGain Systems, “Operating an IT Infrastructure is like getting onto the *MRT and expecting it to drive you to your destination unimpeded and on time, all the time. Customers expect immediate and fault-free service, and many will complain loudly when this doesn’t happen.
“This was exactly how Bloomberg customers reacted to the outage.”
Does your organization have what it takes to prevent a similar Bloomberg-like outage? Contact us to learn how you can prevent IT outage today.
*MRT refers to Singapore’s Mass Rapid Transport system.
**Email address and phone numbers are blank out due to privacy.
