About VPay, the Total B2B Payment Solution
VPay uses patented technology to prevent fraud and expedite billions of dollars in payments every year through the issue of one-time use credit cards. Their solution processes more than 100,000 transactions every day for clients across several verticals including Healthcare, Auto Insurance and Home Warranty.
Potential for Quick Impact
When Shane Carden landed at VPay, he knew that he could makea huge impact. The organization was reliant on a legacy system that was not keeping up with growth and required manual processes.
Prior to LogicMonitor, VPay’s IT operations team was relying almost entirely on a combination of Zabbix for basic CPU monitoring, and the daily completion of a 144-line checklist. Four operations admins would spend eight hours going through this checklist each day to to ensure that a complex infrastructure comprised of both legacy and modern systems was up and running.
The IT team had zero visibility into network and server uptime. When an outage or problem occurred with the processing and delivery of payments, they would learn about it via customer complaint. As a result, Shane’s team was putting out as many as 30 P1 issues per month. The unreliability of VPay’s existing monitoring system was not sustainable.
And the stakes were high – particularly when it came to the many healthcare companies serviced by VPay. HIPPA compliance requires that all instruction of benefits and remittances must be delivered in hard copy, via mail or fax.
Because postage costs up to twenty times more than a faxed document, VPay relies on clusters of virtualized fax servers that send up to 14,000 faxes every hour. If a fax fails, the document must be mailed, and the cost of postage adds up quickly. For a company that relies on the successful completion of more than 100,000 faxes each day, there are tens of thousands of dollars at stake.
Just four weeks after deploying LogicMonitor we reduced P1 issues by half. A few months after that, it was down to practically down to zero.
Shane Carden Manager, Development Operations, VPay
The LogicMonitor Solution
The choice for Shane and his team was easy: he had deployed LogicMonitor at his previous job and experienced great success for several years.
VPay’s implementation of LogicMonitor was simple and straightforward. The three-step plan started with the setup of monitoring for the fax distribution and throughput of their virtualized fax servers. Given the volume of faxes processed by VPay and the relatively steep expense of the postage alternative, it was very important that VPay was able to track successful, HIPPA-compliant communications.
With this crucial component in place, the IT team could set up monitoring of the entire complex transaction flow managed by VPay. This is critical for a company that processes nearly $500 million per month and delivers value based on tight SLAs tied to quick transaction turnaround. The third step in VPay’s deployment of LogicMonitor was to democratize the knowledge required to maintain the systems and resolve issues quickly.
LogicMonitor’s flexible alerting allowed Shane and his team to customize alerts by embedding links to support documentation directly into the alert messages. That meant that the individual receiving the alert would not only be made immediately aware of the issue, but would also be equipped with the information to resolve it on the spot.
Visible Impact
LogicMonitor’s impact on VPay’s internal operations was immediate. Thanks to LogicMonitor, VPay was able to reduce the 30 P1 issues by half in just the first month. After 60 days, the IT team was fielding only one per week. Three months after deployment, VPay became so proactive in the management of their systems, they’d cut emergency issues down to practically zero.
VPay now enjoys unified monitoring across all of its once disparate systems. The flow of hundreds of thousands of daily transactions is easily monitored across a myriad of systems. LogicMonitor made the process of pulling everything together under a single pane of glass simple and straightforward.
Furthermore, thanks to the thoughtful approach to alert messaging, systems maintenance is no longer the job of highly skilled operation admins. Shane is now able to deploy any team member to monitoring and refocus his top talent on important projects that drive business.
Improved Partner Ecosystem
Perhaps the most impactful result of VPay’s implementation of LogicMonitor is their newfound ability to proactively alert partners to issues that arise – even outside of VPay’s system. “With LogicMonitor, we’re able to route alerts and notifications directly to partners themselves,” says Shane. VPay partners appreciate the information, which makes them proactive in their approach to their own end users. The trust and collaboration fostered between VPay and its partners continues to grow and LogicMonitor has become a key player in those relationships.
One Year Later
Today, one year after deploying LogicMonitor, VPay’s internal operations are running smoothly and efficiently. Tens of thousands of dollars in savings is ensured every day by an IT team that is focused on strategic projects, and quickly processing transactions for consumers across the nation.
Oh, and that 144-line checklist? It was decommissioned just eight weeks after the introduction of LogicMonitor.