Virgin Entertainment's Megastores' 10 destination stores are designed to create a uniquely engaging experience. That experience can easily go awry if critical applications like the listening kiosks, digital signage, and credit processing don't run at full capacity.

That's exactly what happened as the company's complex infrastructure created a lack of network visibility. Issues like slow credit card transactions became difficult to isolate, making it nearly impossible to keep the check-out performance running smoothly, and risking customer dissatisfaction as a result.

To solve the transaction anomalies and ultimately avoid the long lines that form as a result of such slowdowns, in April 2008 Virgin deployed as solution from Inetco to monitor in real time the deviations in transactions like slowdowns or multiple card swipes.

This visualization isolates the root cause of network issues, expediting the time to repair, which Fort says affects the customer experience. "We can point to when we had a problem at the register because people dump the product," says Robert Fort, vice president of information technology and CIO at Virgin Entertainment Group. One employee once saw a customer walk away from a $500 purchase when the registers slowed down and lines got long.

To keep such drop-and-runs from happening, Virgin's solution correlates all application performance issues and sends alerts to key people on Fort's team. If a few alerts are sent in a short time period about one register in one particular store, then the team can home in on the affected area. Typically transactions are slowed by network outages, but Fort says that Virgin also has the ability to determine if the problems originate at its suppliers. For example, Fort's team recently determined that a slowdown was coming from Visa and not its network. A quick call to Visa solved the problem. "There's no way a human can keep up with this type of monitoring," he says. "We couldn't staff the people to do that."

Since deploying the system, Fort says, Virgin has reported no failure of credit systems. Next up, Fort is looking into the possibility of using the alert system to monitor its listening kiosks for slow music play. This way, he can determine the problem, such as a lack of bandwidth in the store, and can fix it before the customer gets irritated and walks out. "If it takes too long, it's frustrating for the customers," Fort says. "Currently we have no insight into the issues happening at the kiosks."