Network Performance | November 7, 2024
By Alex Rassey : Go-To-Market Strategist and Growth Leader
Milliseconds Mean Millions for Trading Infrastructures
In finance, time is literally money and customers, governments, and regulators all watch every cent and second closely — so traders must do so as well.
Read on to see how an emerging best practice in trade network infrastructure monitoring ensures the quality of transactions and compliance with changing regulations.
What makes monitoring trade infrastructures so challenging?
With the possible exception of life-and-death healthcare networks, financial institutions face the greatest pressure within the private sector to get digital transactions right and document them end to end. Along with the relentless scrutiny, financial services organizations tend to manage a higher percentage of their business-critical data onsite, rather than in the cloud, within custom or legacy systems.
This extra control over their data gives companies greater ability to protect client data and document transactions. But, maintaining multiple systems that may or may not talk to one another creates a more complicated architecture and redundant configurations and security controls. Striking and maintaining the balance between speed and control requires highly precise and exacting visibility into networks and applications.
That essentially means the fewer “pieces” you need to buy and manage, the better.
Consolidated RTIMA Solutions Deliver Unparalleled Visibility and Control
Like financial services companies and trading exchanges themselves, monitoring infrastructures benefit from strategic consolidation to streamline visibility and control. Keysight delivers the ultimate visibility and control at line rate by integrating xMetrics® cutting-edge flow monitoring software from Instrumentix within its Vision network packet broker (NPB) appliances.
Using the Keysight and Instrumentix technology together creates real-time trade infrastructure monitoring and analysis (RTIMA) capabilities for capturing, decoding, and understanding traffic that contains information about orders, trades and market data. This unified approach delivers actionable insight to traders, brokers, and exchanges so IT teams and finance professionals alike can make the right decisions at every stage of the trade lifecycle.
How to Build a Modern Trade Monitoring Infrastructure
Essential components and capabilities of a modern financial network monitoring infrastructure include:
- Capture and decodingof real-time network traffic from trading components such as feed handlers, order management systems, and smart order routers
- Correlation of complex, nonlinear relationships to track performance across environments
- Network performance measurement that delivers metrics related to bandwidth, traffic rates, packet rates, and microbursts and exposes TCP behavior anomalies such as retransmission and zero-window errors
- Transformation and enrichment of data from external sources to aid in complex operations like rewriting symbology, mathematical calculations on data fields, and enrichment of fields with metadata
- Long-term storage for all business transactions, summary metrics, network details, and raw decoded events, including ElasticSearch, InfluxDB, Clickhouse and TimescaleDB
- Adaptive alerting that covers business data, network behavior (microbursts, bandwidth, retransmissions), and server health
- Streamlined reporting on all available data
xMetrics™: Modern Visibility Extends Legacy Investments
Investment banking and venue technologists designed xMetrics flow monitoring software to provide affordable global trading environment instrumentation at every stage of the trade life cycle. A modular, scalable architecture maximizes deployment flexibility and the value of previous investments in monitoring.
Benefits include:
- Rich metadata to enrich monitoring and analysis
- Monitoring all asset-class trading activities across most exchanges, venues, and asset classes.
- Real-time data capture tracks, stores, and alerts on Ticks, Quotes and Orders for analysis
- Unparalleled scale streamlines deployment into complex environments
- Complete multi-hop visibility across every transaction
- Faster correlation and root cause analysis for rapid identification and summarization of issues
- Improved forensics – capture and replay of traffic to analyze market or system issues after the fact
What are the Key Components of Trade Network Infrastructure Visibility?
Complete solutions include monitoring interactions between and across trading systems, exchanges, and broker networks to ensure transactions get executed correctly and efficiently. Keysight network visibility platforms feature optical taps that send traffic from financial networks to packet brokers, also known as “tap aggregators.”
These powerful hardware-based packet brokers capture, filter and prepare traffic for analysis by the Instrumentix monitoring software already onboard. Running xMetricswithin the Vision appliances achieves seamless, line-rate visibility and control with fewer hops and handoffs potentially causing latency.
The integrated solution also lowers operational overhead since hardware requirements (for external or dedicated servers), configuration efforts and bandwidth consumption all decrease. The Keysight TimeKeeper even synchronizes the xMetricssystem clocks and gathers statistics as shown:
Use Cases for Integrated Visibility Solutions
Many aspects of monitoring and managing financial network infrastructures benefit from seamless data capture and flow monitoring and analysis. Primary use cases include:
Market data monitoring to minimize latency and maximize throughput of critical market data feeds. Combined Keysight / xMetrics solutions provide 1ms traffic sampling, packet loss detection, real-time alerts and metadata for comprehensive visibility coverage.
Application and network latency monitoring across complex, multi-hop environments. Intelligent visibility correlates messages across the network, infrastructure, and application tiers to show how each tier affects latency and end-to-end performance.
Compliance monitoring with accurate timestamping on both a continuous and historic basis. The xMetrics platform provides a fully independent and integrated solution for the capture of all application network and transaction data required for RTS and FINRA reporting, evaluation and storage.
