We use a variety of tools throughout the day, and here’s what nearly everyone uses. Each team also has their own set of tools specific to the type of work they do. You can find more about those in each team’s section of the wiki. No matter your role at Banno, here’s also some basic reporting information to find details on production institutions, UAT institutions, and users.
Cloud Storage and Collaboration
When your laptop dies, cloud storage should mean little to no downtime! Anything that doesn’t live in GitHub should be in the cloud and not only on your laptop. Two options are available; Digital uses Google Drive and JHA has started to use Microsoft OneDrive.
Google Drive
Many things live here including product documentation, documentation to specific engineering teams, product briefs, design specs, research notes, recorded talks, digital versions of technical books and some schedule and money tracking information. Using Drive is an easy way to collaborate with team members.
Google File Stream is the bees knees. It can be set up to allow offline file access and supports basic symlink options. Use it!
Google Team drives
Check with your team to see if they use a public or private Team Drive and if you don’t have access ask! These team drives are great whether you’re on Product, an oncall Firefighter, working with TechOps, or need access to a piece of software.
Datadog
At Digital, Datadog is a go-to tool for:
- Debugging
- Investigating use cases
- Searching and troubleshooting logs
- Monitoring our Staging, UAT, and PROD environments
Datadog is a powerful and easy-to-use visualization tool. It allows us to do searches, analyze, and visualize data, our logs, in real time. All you need to do to use Datadog is visit: https://jackhenry.okta.com and sign in using your jackhenry.com corporate account. DataDog will have it’s own tile with their logo on it, clicking on it will take you to the Datadog dashboard. After that, select “Logs” on the left sidebar, and then “Search”.
Data Services (DS) Reporting
Query for reports and view Banno logs with DS Reporting. These logs give us a “story” of what we or the user did, as well as information received and processed by institutions, end users, and the jxchange API. We then use these logs to troubleshoot and resolve issues. Formerly known as Fetch Reporting in our startup days, DS Reporting was created by one of our own and continues to be built upon. This is important to know as you might hear others refer to DS Reporting as “Fetch Reporting.”
If needed, here’s some basic reporting information on how to find details about production institutions, UAT institutions, and end users.
We use Gmail as our email client. Your temporary credentials should be emailed to your personal email listed on your onboarding ticket, or to your JH email address. Your gmail account should be firstnameinitiallastname@jackhenry.com, use the full name to sign in.
If you do not have a Google account, you will have a Jack Henry email.
Github
Github is where we keep our full code base, design files as well as where members from different teams make issues.
Follow the Github Onboarding guide to gain permissions. Make sure you add your name and a picture of yourself to your profile and enable 2 factor authentication on your account in the settings.
We have also prepared documents about how to make a pull request and how to set up Github.
Honeycomb
Honeycomb is an observability tool that we use to be able to ask questions about services and how they are doing. It allows us to look at traces and their attributes to have a better idea of our systems health.
Not sure what tracing is? Check out Open Telemtry
Kibana
At Banno, Kibana is a go-to tool for:
- Debugging
- Investigating use cases
- Searching and troubleshooting logs
- Monitoring our UAT and PROD environments
Pronounced Kuh-bah-nuh (you can take a listen here), Kibana is a powerful and easy-to-use visualization tool built on top of the Elastic Stack, a group of open source products that formats, searches, analyzes, and visualizes data in real time. If needed, here’s some basic reporting information on how to find details about production institutions, UAT institutions, and end users.
Microsoft Office
Sometimes you just need to open a Word document. Digital primarily uses Google Drive for creation and storage of docs and spreadsheets, but Office is available and now offers some online doc capabilities. For users who would like to use Office, they can follow the below instructions or check their Self Service+ application (JH logo icon) under “Digital - Software” and download the Office 365 products all at once. It is a large package and downloading may take a few minutes to complete depending on your internet speeds.
Login with your @jhacorp.com account. This is the same as your @jackhenry.com or @profitstars.com email, ex: bmoose@jhacorp.com.
Once you’re signed in, click “Install Office 201x” in the top right corner to pick the applications you’d like to download.
Slack
Slack is the client we use to keep in touch between offices, with remote workers, and even within the same office on a day-to-day basis. It allows us to communicate asynchronously, keeping distractions to a minimum. As soon as your Banno gmail account is set up, getting started is simple.
Go to Digital’s Slack website and click create an account. You will be prompted to enter your Digital email account. You’ll just have to set your job title and full name, then you will be good to go.
We have also prepared a document of communication guidelines that will guide you on how we use chat.
SQL
Some teams use the SQL Automation Tool … a lot! SQL is used to communicate with a database. According to ANSI (American National Standards Institute), it is the standard language for relational database management systems. SQL statements are used to perform tasks such as update data on a database, or retrieve data from a database.
If you need to setup postgres-connect on your machine, check out this helpful guide.
Zoom
Zoom is used for a lot of our larger meetings, like All Hands and larger Retrospectives. Zoom allows for more participants than other solutions, and gives us an easy recording solution so those that miss out can catch up later.
If Zoom is the software of choice for a meeting, you’ll see a link in the meeting’s description. Clicking the link will lead you through the install process, and recorded meetings will be posted in Slack once they’ve been uploaded to Google Drive.