ATM and POS Monitoring

[echwallah]

We have clients mostly Banks and Financial institutions who are heavily using Dynatrace and always want us to cover their entire customer touch points including POS and Automated Teller Machines.

We have implemented a solution that leverages on the databases that these devices write to and send the same as metrics including Cash Jam, Amount of Cash in Cassettes, Mode(Supervisory, Operational among others).

Does any one have or is using a better implementation for these devices?

Is there an extension for this since most ATMs run on Windows Operating Systems but the vendor might be reluctant to install an Agent in this devices.

I need to know the best approach for this and also if Dynatrace is looking at building an Activegate extension for such devices

[Julius_Loman · Accepted solution]

Even ATMs are Windows, they typically have limited resources and limited network connections. Installing OneAgents for resource monitoring in infrastructure mode is certainly doable, however you could leverage also more lightweight solutions to collect metrics and push them to Dynatrace. Or you can poll the ATMs externally for metrics (WMI) - since its Windows, but this typically isn't possible due to network and security policies. 

On the other side, I'd recommend using OpenKit for monitoring the experience and sending data out from ATM. This however has to be implemented into the application itself. There are dozens of vendors of ATM software and it must be implemented by them into the application. So it's typically a long journey. OpenKit is lightweight and you can also monitor the user experience with ATM - which, I believe, is the most important. 

[echwallah]

Thank you @Julius_Loman for this so basically would we able to get beyond user experience which you might mean the device's response time and such but what is of essence here is things like How much is in the cassette per denomination, cash jam, and for Point of Sale Terminals things like battery level, signal strength with OpenKit?

Secondly is it possible in theory to build an Activegate Extension that can be able to do this and what would it take?

[Julius_Loman]

If it's possible on the ATM side to query this remotely (WMI, HTTP, whatever protocol of your choice), then ActiveGate Extension 1.0 is possible (or Extension 2.0 when it supports the protocol you need to fetch the metrics). But based on my experience, typically you won't have access (especially to pos terminals) from an ActiveGate due to strict security policies or very slow networks. I would recommend it done the other way -so the devices will send the data instead. But your situation may differ.

OpenKit is not ideal solution for pushing technology metrics regularly like each minute, but it's doable too. For that, I'd go using the metric ingestion - if required.

Basically, for situations like signal strength, cash jam, battery level - they could have pretty heavy impact on user experience and I'd send this data along with the user sessions.

I believe it's not possible to provide you with a generic answer, since the technologies on POS terminal and ATMS differ significantly.  But I'd use both OpenKit (not easy since this needs to be implemented into the application) and for technology metrics something lightweight on the ATM/POS side and push them to Dynatrace using the metric ingestion API.