Observability enables transparency, accountability, and efficiency in public sector IT.
At Punjab National Bank, we run one of the largest, most diverse IT landscapes in the country—spanning branches, core banking, middleware, digital channels, and regulatory platforms. The complexity is enormous, and so is the expectation: performance, uptime, and auditability at every step. In this context, observability is not a luxury—it’s a strategic enabler of service delivery and compliance.
In public sector banking, we often deal with systems that have evolved over decades. We can’t afford to discard them overnight, yet we must integrate them with modern digital interfaces and deliver a seamless experience to customers and regulators alike. This means our observability goals are multi-layered—we need visibility into not just application health, but also data flows, backend jobs, batch dependencies, and regulatory handshakes.
One of our biggest challenges is the asynchronous nature of many of our systems. For example, a service request initiated at the branch or digital interface may go through multiple back-office systems before it’s fulfilled. If a delay happens, we need to pinpoint where exactly it occurred— was it a job scheduler? A network node? A data mismatch? That kind of diagnosis is difficult without well-integrated observability pipelines.
In complex, federated environments like ours, observability must bring transparency not just to systems—but to decisions, delays, and deviations.
I’ve come to believe that the real power of observability lies in process correlation. It’s not just about metrics or uptime. It’s about seeing the transaction the way a user sees it—across channels, across systems, and across delays. If a pension payment gets delayed, it’s not enough to know that the server was up. We need to know whether the file was generated, the signature verified, the payment dispatched, and the acknowledgment received.
The second big aspect is governance. Observability, for us, also has a strong compliance angle. We need to demonstrate that our systems not only work—but work securely, consistently, and within regulated SLAs. That’s why we are looking at observability as a foundation for audit readiness— capturing event trails, access patterns, and exception handling automatically, without burdening our teams with manual logs or checklists.
In public sector setups, cost and capacity are always critical considerations. We can’t afford to flood our infrastructure with telemetry or over-provision our monitoring stack. So we’re taking a more targeted approach to observability—identifying critical journeys, high-volume transactions, and sensitive data paths, and focusing our efforts there.
We’re also pushing for more awareness and skill-building across our IT and operations teams. Observability is not just for NOC engineers—it’s a shared responsibility. Everyone—from infra admins to application developers to business users—needs to understand how their piece of the puzzle contributes to overall service health.
–Authored by Ashwini Kumar Pandey, Chief Information Security Officer, Punjab National Bank
