TMNA Services – Gaining IT Maturity with Catchpoint

TMNA Services (TMNAS) provides professional support services to the companies of Tokio Marine North America (TMNA), the holding company for the Tokio Marine Group’s U.S. operation. Those companies include Philadelphia Insurance Companies, First Insurance Company of Hawaii, and Tokio Marine America.

TMNAS is focused on efficiencies and automation that help it work smarter and maintain a lean IT team. Along those lines, it helps each of its sister company’s IT departments evaluate products and compare costs for internal vs. external hosting. TMNAS signed up with Catchpoint as part of their effort to implement an efficient monitoring strategy and as an impetus to gaining IT maturity.

“Catchpoint has become our source of truth for the IT environment. With it, we improve processes, save costs, and provide a new level of visibility and transparency.”

Pete Charlton, IT AVP for TMNA

Enabling IT Maturity with End-to-End Monitoring

TMNAS relied on traditional infrastructure monitoring that alerted issues related to server capacity or memory usage. The monitoring strategy lacked end-to-end application monitoring capabilities. Pete Charlton, IT AVP for TMNA, heads a team tasked with managing IT operations for the Group companies. With so many different companies, pulling data and sharing insights with each company was not efficient or effective. The monitored data was limited to the availability of the network and infrastructure without providing any insight into any actual performance metrics.

Moving to Catchpoint has streamlined the efforts of Charlton’s team. Now they can easily create distinct dashboards for each company which can be shared with the company’s stakeholders. “We didn’t have the maturity to provide this level of insight before Catchpoint. Now we can illustrate how we’ve grown as an IT organization, such as the fact that we’re running 5-minute polling of applications,” says Charlton

TMNAS utilizes Catchpoint nodes deployed throughout the US and Mexico over several carriers to run active monitoring and testing. With the insights and performance visibility that Catchpoint provides, TMNAS is able to isolate and troubleshoot issues faster and more effectively.

Ensuring the Productivity of Remote Workforce

TMNAS and its sister companies shifted to a remote workspace nearly five years ago as part of their business continuity initiative in case of unforeseen circumstances. The COVID-19 pandemic has forced nearly every TMNAS employee to work from home. TMNAS had to ensure that it was now monitoring employee experience as well and Catchpoint was able to help TMNAS implement these changes in their monitoring strategy. “Everyone has varying levels of home connectivity and might even suffer from poor WiFi coverage in parts of their homes. With Catchpoint, we can generate instant tests in remote areas. Plus, Catchpoint’s large node presence enables us to troubleshoot regional Internet issues,” explains Charlton.

Efficient Incident Management

Using Catchpoint, TMNAS has reduced the time spent troubleshooting issues with its partners. The stakeholders have the data and analytics necessary to handle an incident without having to wait on a third-party or vendor to provide the details. The ability to test from multiple geographical locations over different carriers and drilling down into specific data points has enabled TMNAS to resolve performance incidents quickly. “Now we can easily isolate an issue and escalate directly with our vendors, bypassing internal escalation,” explains Charlton.

TMNAS takes advantage of Catchpoint’s seamless integration capabilities to connect popular third-party vendors and correlate data using dashboards. Additionally, TMNAS leverages Catchpoint to verify vendor SLAs. The data from the Catchpoint platform is used by the stakeholders in the group companies to ensure their SaaS providers are upholding SLAs.

Summary

TMNAS was relying on a monitoring strategy that lacked application and site monitoring capabilities. The IT team took significant time to troubleshoot issues and determine root causes which had a negative impact on the end-user experience. To expedite incident handling, TMNAS wanted to shift to a more proactive monitoring strategy that offered end-to-end visibility. When the company’s new CTO saw the gap in monitoring, he launched a search for a solution. “The right thing to do was make a modest investment in monitoring so we could see which apps are up or down, which ones are misbehaving, and track trends over time,” continues Charlton.

TMNAS was able to better evaluate the end-user experience with Catchpoint. They now have visibility into the user’s perspective and access to performance metrics that made it easier to troubleshoot issues. The broad range of monitoring test types and the simplicity of administration are just some of the reasons TMNAS selected Catchpoint to overhaul their traditional monitoring strategy. Read the complete case study here!