Navy Federal Credit Union Sees Member Experience in Real Time

As a leading not-for-profit financial cooperative, Navy Federal Credit Union is committed to serving all branches of the military, veterans, DoD employees, and their families with best-in-class banking services — both in-branch and online. As its digital footprint expanded, Navy Federal harnessed TrafficPeak, gaining real-time observability across its digital services and unlocking a whole new level of operational insight.

Navy Federal had always prioritized observability, but its reliance on disparate monitoring tools made it difficult to get a unified view of digital performance. “We used performance-monitoring tools, including synthetic monitoring, but those only show data from a single point in time. We had no way of knowing what our members were actually experiencing in real time,” explained Brett Sidebottom, Manager of Cybersecurity Technology Engineering for the credit union.

Correlating data across multiple tools was cumbersome and inefficient, often slowing issue resolution. As Navy Federal re-platformed its mobile and online banking infrastructure, these gaps in visibility became even more problematic.

“There were times we just didn’t know enough, fast enough. We lacked a complete system-wide overview of what was happening with our members online,” Sidebottom continued.

As Navy Federal considered its options, it quickly ruled out building an in-house observability platform. “You can create an ELK Stack and pull in data, but that takes expertise, commitment, and a ton of FTE hours. You also have to control ingest, storage, and compute costs — it’s a risky road with no guaranteed success,” underscored Sidebottom.

As an existing mPulse and Akamai App & API Protector customer, Navy Federal turned to TrafficPeak on Akamai Cloud — and found integration was seamless. “With all our platform traffic already flowing through Akamai, going live with TrafficPeak was an easy decision and process,” Sidebottom said.

TrafficPeak is a managed observability service that ingests, retains, and analyzes massive amounts of log data (at least 1 terabyte a month), and presents performance and security insights in one dashboard. Since TrafficPeak ingests data in real time, keeps all data hot for subsecond querying, and costs 75% less than legacy providers, companies like Navy Federal can find and fix issues instantly, before end users notice, all while reducing their observability spend.

TrafficPeak’s proof of concept quickly validated its value. Since TrafficPeak is a managed service, Akamai handled the configurations and ingest, log delivery, and data and presentation layers. It also provided dashboards and training.

“In just two weeks, we were up and running — and it would have been just two days if we didn’t have to observe stringent Navy Federal requirements. Akamai provided white-glove service. It was the best implementation I’ve had with any product,” said Sidebottom.

Compared to building an in-house solution, TrafficPeak’s time to value was unbeatable. According to Sidebottom, “It would take weeks just to get our first log delivery if we built our own solution. Plus, we couldn’t have recreated what TrafficPeak delivers: near–real time data across our large, geographically dispersed member base.”

For Sidebottom and Navy Federal, the speed at which TrafficPeak delivered value was a game changer. It immediately filled a critical gap. “We get fresh data every 5 to 10 seconds. Now, teams across cloud engineering, APIs, and digital banking — along with our executives — have a crystal-clear view of how well we’re serving our members, in near real time,” said Sidebottom.

With TrafficPeak, Navy Federal can pinpoint performance and stability issues instantly, tracing their ripple effects across the entire application experience. Sidebottom’s “Critical Components” dashboard keeps tabs on about 15 key service calls, tracking performance metrics across different percentiles.

“Seeing everything at once — correlating issues across multiple application calls — lets us spot cascading problems before they snowball, and recover from incidents faster than ever,” he continued.

When something goes wrong, Sidebottom doesn’t waste time guessing or corralling a team of geographically distributed team members to try to understand the worldwide member experience. “We can pinpoint the exact moment an issue began and how it’s impacting other areas. Then, we hand over precise, time-stamped data to the right team, so they can fix it fast.”

This real-time observability saves Navy Federal both time and money, significantly reducing resolution times. “TrafficPeak delivers the right visibility, exactly when we need it. The ability to monitor every function’s health in real time has dramatically shortened our time to resolution.”

Navy Federal’s members are the biggest winners. With a clearer view of performance and availability, the credit union can ensure smooth digital banking operations and proactively enhance the user experience.

Frequent feature updates are a key part of Navy Federal’s innovation strategy. But if a new release causes issues, TrafficPeak catches it immediately. Explained Sidebottom, “With instant insights into issues, we can roll back fast to a stable version.”

For Sidebottom, imagining life without TrafficPeak isn’t an option. “The confidence we now have in our systems — knowing their exact status in near real time — has been a monumental improvement. Without TrafficPeak, we’d be in the Dark Ages. We’d lose the ability to truly understand our members’ experiences and react to issues at the speed we do today,” he continued.

Fortunately, TrafficPeak isn’t going anywhere. In fact, its impact is about to grow. “We’re expanding TrafficPeak access to more teams across the credit union,” explained Sidebottom.

With real-time visibility and a commitment to continuous improvement, Navy Federal is ensuring seamless, reliable, and future-ready digital banking. “The more people using TrafficPeak, the bigger the benefits — for our organization and our 14 million members,” Sidebottom concluded.

Established in 1933 with only 7 members, Navy Federal now has the distinct honor of serving more than 14 million members globally and is the world’s largest credit union. As a member-owned and not-for-profit organization, Navy Federal always puts the financial needs of its members first. Membership is open to all Department of Defense and Coast Guard active duty, veterans, civilian and contractor personnel, and their families. Dedicated to its mission of service, Navy Federal employs a workforce of 24,000 and has a global network of more than 360 branches. For more information about Navy Federal Credit Union, visit navyfederal.org.