Business and Operational Storyboard

Overview

The Business and Operational Storyboard in vuSmartMaps provides an interactive view of business and operational metrics. It helps users understand the health and performance of key business journeys, such as UPI and other digital payment transactions. A similar concept can be seen in a smartphone health or battery usage screen, where users can quickly check battery level, app usage, storage, network status, and performance warnings from one place. In the same way, the Business and Operational Storyboard brings important business and operational indicators together so teams can quickly understand the current state of a transaction journey.

The storyboard brings together important indicators such as latency, error rate, throughput, transaction volume, success and failure counts, turnaround time, technical decline, business decline, response time, and user experience score. These metrics help banking and payment teams monitor transaction performance, identify issues, and understand where attention is required.

The storyboard is designed for different user roles, including NOC engineers, L1/L2 application support teams, IT managers, CIOs, CTOs, business analysts, customer support teams, and cross-functional teams. It provides real-time visibility, AI-driven insights, and collaboration support for monitoring and optimizing IT systems.

Why This Feature Is Useful

In banking and payment environments, a single transaction may pass through applications, infrastructure, databases, servers, and external payment systems. The Business and Operational Storyboard brings these views together in one place.

It helps teams:

• Monitor transaction performance in real time.
• Track successful and failed transactions.
• Identify technical and business declines.
• Analyze response time, turnaround time, and throughput.
• Review infrastructure health and server status.
• Check trace-level issues using status code trends.
• View flagged issues that need attention.
• Analyze business dimensions such as location, demographics, consumers, merchants, and partners.

This helps operations and support teams quickly understand the current state of a business journey and identify where further analysis is required.

Example Scenario

A payment operations team is reviewing UPI transaction performance for a selected time range. The team opens the Business and Operational Storyboard and checks key metrics such as transaction count, technical decline, business decline, 95th percentile response time, and user experience score.

If the Business Decline panel shows an issue, the team selects the relevant parameter from the table. They can then review the Business Failure Trend and transaction details such as timestamp, request UUID, RRN, trace ID, response category, result, error code, response time, and customer ID. For deeper analysis, the team can click the trace ID to view transaction logs.

When to Use This Feature

Use the Business and Operational Storyboard when:

• Monitoring the health of a payment or business journey.
• Reviewing transaction success and failure trends.
• Analyzing technical decline or business decline.
• Checking latency, response time, throughput, and turnaround time.
• Investigating failed transactions using transaction details.
• Reviewing infrastructure status, such as server up/down count.
• Analyzing trace-level status code trends.
• Monitoring UPI application performance.
• Reviewing compliance-related technical decline indicators.
• Analyzing transaction value and customer activity.
• Understanding business dimensions such as location, demographics, consumers, merchants, and partners.

Keep an eye on flagged issues! Storyboards highlight performance anomalies and critical alerts, helping you identify and address unstable states before they impact your business.

Comprehensive Understanding

Business Metrics and Storyboard Views

vuSmartMaps equips businesses with a comprehensive set of lead indicators, facilitating a holistic understanding of their operations. The business storyboard provides a panoramic view of key metrics, enabling users to gauge the health and performance of their processes. Here are some generic scenarios where the storyboard proves invaluable:

• Latency, Error Rate, and Throughput: Measure the efficiency of your transactions by analyzing latency, error rates, and throughput in real-time. Identify bottlenecks and optimize processes for enhanced performance.
• Success and Failure Metrics: Track the number of successful and failed transactions within a reporting period. This insight is crucial for identifying issues, improving success rates, and enhancing overall transaction reliability.
• Transaction Volume: Analyze the number of transactions per minute to understand peak periods and optimize resource allocation. This ensures that your business is prepared to handle varying workloads.
• Turnaround Time: Monitor the turnaround time of transactions to identify delays and streamline processes for improved efficiency.
• Transaction Decline: Measures the percentage of failed transactions due to the bank's technical issues during the selected time range, along with their tolerance limit and the color indication, where red indicates a warning, amber indicates caution, and green indicates a value within acceptable limits.

The insight at the bottom of the panel indicates a flagged issue in performance, leading to an unstable state that requires attention.

Simply select any parameter from the table to gain a comprehensive understanding of the essential aspects of a specific business journey. This action will provide you with a holistic overview of the entire business journey.

For instance, if you want to analyze the business decline in the selected time range, you can check the panel showcasing the graphical representation of the Business Failure Trend, along with a tabular representation of the transaction.

Tabular data for the Business Decline Transaction outlines information such as:

• Timestamp: The date and time when a specific transaction happens.
• Request UUID: Unique ID assigned to the particular transaction for tracking across multiple application purposes.
• RRN (Retrieval Reference Number): A unique business reference number for financial transactions, aiding retrieval and tracking
• Trace Id: Click on any "trace_id" to see all the Transaction logs to get more details.
• Resp Category (Response Category): Denotes the category or type of response received.
• Result: Indicate the outcomes of the transaction (Failure or Success).
• Resp Desc (Response Description): Description of the cause for transaction decline.
• Error Code: Any failure that happens, comes within the error code.
• Response Time: Total duration is taken to process the transaction and generate the response.
• Customer ID: A unique ID associated with the customer involved in the transaction.

Additionally, you can also analyze the infrastructure through a storyboard to gain valuable insights into system components, performance metrics, databases, and servers for in-depth infrastructure analysis. This ensures a thorough understanding of infrastructure health, fostering optimal operation and enhancing user satisfaction.

For example, the Server Panel at the top represents the total number of servers, and how many of them are Up or Down.

Similarly, the Application Server trend chart highlights Heap Memory Usage in the selected time range.

Traces Storyboard

Similarly, you can also analyze the Traces through the storyboard.

Following are the panels that showcase the information about the Traces for the selected time range:

• Count by HTTP status Code: It helps the user promptly recognize performance degradation by examining the code value. It emphasizes the need for immediate action if the count of HTTP status codes(400..500....) is abnormal
• Count by Status Code: It helps the user efficiently recognize performance degradation by examining the code value. It emphasizes the need for immediate action if the count of status codes other than 0 is abnormal
• HTTP Status Code trend over time: Helps to quickly identify the duration of failure by interpreting status codes like 400, 500, and similar values.
• Status code trend over time: Frequency of success/failure status code over specific time intervals

For user-specific needs, prompt identification and resolution of technical issues are crucial for IT operations personnel.

IT Ops Storyboard

IT Ops Storyboard provides a set of metrics that actively monitor the performance of the UPI (Digital/Instant Payment) Application:

• Transaction Count (Txn Count): Keep a close eye on the total number of transactions within the target, with color-coded indicators for a quick assessment of performance.
• Technical Decline: Monitor the percentage of failed transactions due to technical issues, helping IT teams pinpoint areas that require immediate attention.
• Business Decline: Track the percentage of failed transactions due to business-related issues, such as compliance or banking restrictions, within the selected time range.
• 95P Response Time: Understand the response time at the 95th percentile for transactions, ensuring optimal performance and user experience.
• User Experience (UEI): Gauge the user experience with a score ranging from 1 to 10, analyzing technical failures and transaction processing times. A high UEI score indicates optimal performance.

Insight into Flagged Issues:
The IT Ops Storyboard provides insights into flagged issues that require attention. This feature allows IT teams to prioritize and address critical issues promptly, minimizing the impact on the overall performance of the UPI application.

Compliance Monitoring:
Compliance is a key aspect of IT operations, and the Compliance panel in the IT Ops Storyboard provides insights into various compliance factors, including:

• Payer PSP TD (Technical Decline): Monitor technical declines as the Payer PSP, ensuring adherence to acceptable limits.
• Payee PSP TD (Technical Decline): Track technical declines as the Payee PSP, addressing issues promptly to maintain compliance.
• Remitter Bank TD (Technical Decline): Keep an eye on technical declines as the Remitter Bank, ensuring compliance with set limits.
• Beneficiary Bank TD (Technical Decline): Monitor technical declines as the Beneficiary Bank, addressing issues to uphold compliance standards.
• Reversal TD: Ensure the successful reversal of debit requests, addressing any issues promptly to prevent debit reversal failures.
• Deemed Approval: Monitor deemed approval instances, taking corrective action to maintain compliance with acceptable limits.

Transaction Value Analysis:
The Transaction Value panel provides a detailed analysis of transactions within the selected time range, including total debited and credited amounts, average transaction value, and the number of new customers joined.

• Address Technical Issues Instantly: Use real-time metrics to identify and resolve technical issues, ensuring optimal performance and minimizing revenue losses.
• Comply with UPI Guidelines: Monitor technical declines and compliance factors to adhere to UPI guidelines, avoiding penalties and maintaining performance rankings.
• Optimize Revenue Growth: Identify revenue opportunities, target customers using other payment service providers, and optimize transaction values with top-performing partners.

Similarly, the various other storyboard helps the user to get operational insight into the transaction journey.

Journey Mapping on the Business Storyboard

One of the standout features of vuSmartMaps is its ability to break down the entire business journey into micro-journeys. This granular approach allows businesses to identify specific touchpoints, understand user interactions, and pinpoint areas for improvement. Through the platform's business storyboard, users can visually navigate each step of the customer journey, enabling them to make informed decisions to enhance the overall customer experience. For example, the Service Map shown below helps to identify the failure node-wise and gives node-wise KPI details on mouse hover on each node.

Business Dimension Analytics
vuSmartMaps takes a user-centric approach to business analytics by providing insights across various dimensions. These include:

• Location Analytics: Understand the geographic impact of your operations. Identify regions with high activity, tailor strategies to specific locations, and optimize resource allocation.
• Demographic Analytics: Gain insights into customer demographics. This information is invaluable for targeted marketing campaigns and product/service customization.
• Consumer and Merchant/Partner Analytics: Analyze consumer behavior and engagement. Evaluate the performance of merchants and partners to foster stronger collaborations and drive business growth.

Stay ahead! Real-time storyboards empower you to proactively monitor IT systems, resolve incidents swiftly, and ensure compliance—minimizing risk and maximizing operational efficiency.

Step-by-Step Instructions

Analyze a Business Journey

1. Open the Business and Operational Storyboard.
2. Select the required time range.
3. Review the key business metrics, such as:
   • Latency
   • Error rate
   • Throughput
   • Success and failure metrics
   • Transaction volume
   • Turnaround time
   • Transaction decline
4. Check the color indication for transaction decline:
   • Red indicates warning.
   • Amber indicates caution.
   • Green indicates a value within acceptable limits.
5. Select a parameter from the table to view details for a specific business journey.
6. Review the graphical trend, such as the Business Failure Trend.
7. Review the transaction table for detailed transaction information.
8. Click the trace_id if transaction logs need to be reviewed.

Analyze Infrastructure Health

1. Open the infrastructure storyboard.
2. Review the Server panel to check:
   • Total number of servers
   • Servers that are up
   • Servers that are down
3. Review the Application Server trend chart.
4. Check heap memory usage for the selected time range.

Analyze Traces

1. Open the traces storyboard.
2. Select the required time range.
3. Review the Count by HTTP Status Code panel.
4. Review the Count by Status Code panel.
5. Check HTTP status code and status code trends over time.
6. Identify any abnormal status code counts or failure patterns.

Analyze IT Operations Metrics

1. Open the IT Ops Storyboard.
2. Review the UPI application metrics:
   • Transaction Count
   • Technical Decline
   • Business Decline
   • 95P Response Time
   • User Experience Indicator
3. Check flagged issues shown in the storyboard.
4. Review the Compliance panel for technical decline indicators.
5. Review the Transaction Value panel to understand debit, credit, average transaction value, and new customer activity.

Analyze Journey Mapping

1. Open the Business Storyboard journey mapping view.
2. Review the micro-journey breakdown.
3. Use the Service Map to identify node-wise failures.
4. Hover over each node to view node-level KPI details.

What Happens After the Steps

After reviewing the Business and Operational Storyboard:

• Users can understand the health of the selected business journey.
• Users can identify transaction failures, latency issues, throughput changes, and decline patterns.
• Users can review detailed failed transaction records.
• Users can open transaction logs using the trace ID.
• Users can analyze infrastructure health through server and application server panels.
• Users can identify trace-level status code patterns.
• IT operations teams can review UPI application performance indicators.
• Users can identify node-wise failure areas through the Service Map.
• Users can analyze business performance across location, demographic, consumer, merchant, and partner dimensions.

Tips / Best Practices

• Review the selected time range before analyzing trends.
• Start with high-level business metrics before moving to detailed transaction tables.
• Use color indicators to quickly identify warning or caution areas.
• Review transaction decline along with response time and error details.
• Use trace ID when deeper transaction log analysis is needed.
• Review business dimension analytics to understand impact by location, customer group, consumer, merchant, or partner.

Troubleshooting

1. Issue: Business decline appears high.

   • Possible Cause: A higher percentage of transactions may be failing due to business-related issues.
   • Solution: Review the Business Failure Trend and transaction table. Check response category, response description, error code, and result for affected transactions.

2. Issue: Technical decline appears high.

   • Possible Cause: Transactions may be failing due to technical issues.
   • Solution: Review the IT Ops Storyboard and Compliance panel. Check technical decline indicators such as Payer PSP TD, Payee PSP TD, Remitter Bank TD, Beneficiary Bank TD, Reversal TD, and Deemed Approval.

3. Issue: Response time is high.

   • Possible Cause: Transactions may be taking longer to process.
   • Solution: Review the 95P Response Time metric and check related latency, throughput, and turnaround time trends.

4. Issue: Transaction logs need deeper investigation.

   • Possible Cause: Summary metrics may not provide enough detail to identify the cause.
   • Solution: Open the transaction table and click the trace_id to view transaction logs.

5. Issue: Infrastructure may be affecting transaction performance.

   • Possible Cause: A server or application server may be down or under stress.
   • Solution: Review the infrastructure storyboard. Check the Server panel for up/down status and the Application Server trend chart for heap memory usage.

FAQs

What is the Business and Operational Storyboard?

The Business and Operational Storyboard is an interactive view in vuSmartMaps that helps users monitor business and operational metrics for transaction journeys.

What key metrics can be monitored?

Users can monitor latency, error rate, throughput, success and failure counts, transaction volume, turnaround time, and transaction decline.

What does Transaction Decline show?

Transaction Decline shows the percentage of failed transactions due to the bank’s technical issues during the selected time range.

How can users analyze a failed transaction?

Users can review the transaction table and click the trace ID to view transaction logs for more details.

What is the IT Ops Storyboard used for?

The IT Ops Storyboard helps monitor UPI application performance using metrics such as Transaction Count, Technical Decline, Business Decline, 95P Response Time, and User Experience Indicator.

What does the Compliance panel show?

The Compliance panel shows technical decline indicators such as Payer PSP TD, Payee PSP TD, Remitter Bank TD, Beneficiary Bank TD, Reversal TD, and Deemed Approval.

What is Journey Mapping?

Journey Mapping breaks the business journey into micro-journeys, helping users identify touchpoints, user interactions, and areas that need attention.

What is Business Dimension Analytics?

Business Dimension Analytics helps users analyze business activity across dimensions such as location, demographics, consumers, merchants, and partners.