BMO: CalMon enhances Calypso platform performance

Accenture’s acquisition Formicary helped one of Canada’s largest banks improve the monitoring of its Calypso platform.

BMO Capital Markets (BMO), the investment and corporate banking arm of Bank of Montreal Financial Group, uses Calypso for its cross-asset front to back office system which supports almost 500 traders and back office users around the world.

During a system upgrade, business users noticed a compromise in the performance of the system, in particular report processing took noticeably longer than usual. The database was found to be the root cause of the issue. However, pinpointing the problem involved many teams and took considerable effort.

In light of this, BMO recognized that better visibility of Calypso engines and server performance would put its support team in a stronger position to identify and respond to glitches before they impact business users.

BMO embarked on a project to enhance its existing generic platform monitoring tool to provide the improved insight into Calypso that was needed. Before long, the bank realized that the project was more complex and costly to implement than originally anticipated.

After deciding that enhancing its existing tools to specifically monitor Calypso was not the solution, BMO looked to CalMon, a comprehensive Calypso monitoring tool.

CalMon was developed to address the specific needs of the trading system environment; observing Calypso specific features such as event consumption, log errors, scheduled tasks, and mid-tier processing alongside resource utilization.

Better platform visibility

CalMon has made the investigation of performance issues at BMO far more efficient.

BMO's support teams are now empowered to quickly identify any sudden changes or delays in report generation as CalMon charts performance history over time. This enables them to pinpoint and address the root causes and speed up the process.

BMO also uses CalMon to monitor errors and issues for the quality assurance of new releases.

Cost-savings, increased business productivity and improved efficiency

Now CalMon runs actively in the background of BMO’s systems and the technology team is alerted if any problems occur. This ensures that events such as unprocessed transfers do not go unnoticed, thereby saving the bank from any costly associated implications.

CalMon also provides the team with convenient access to production log data, making it easy to search historical logs from across the platform and to trigger alerts when particular errors occur.

CalMon provides visibility of the changing resource requirements of Calypso which helps determine and plan future capacity.