Cases in Point

APPLICATION NOTE | INVESTMENT INDUSTRY

Cases in Point

Introduction

In today’s world of electronic trading, “a millisecond advantage in trading applications can be worth $100 million a year to a major brokerage firm.” (“Wall Street’s Quest to Process Data at the Speed of Light,” Information Week, April 23, 2007) The ability to identify and monitor critical market trading applications and protocols, such as FIX, Multicast, TIBCO and others is essential to the day-to-day operation of financial exchanges, trading houses, hedge funds, investment banks and other global financial institutions and market exchanges with trading desks.

Challenges

All trading companies share a common need: to keep up with growing market data and transaction rates and to operate with near-zero latency. Increased competition, higher market data volume, the move to start quoting in penny increments, and new regulatory demands are some of the driving forces behind industry changes. Firms are trying to maintain their competitive edge by constantly adapting their trading strategies and increasing the speed of trading. To support this new era of electronic trading, many firms are bolstering their IT infrastructures with bigger “pipes” capable of handling the forthcoming data influx, as well as providing better, more granular visibility into those larger pipes.

Meeting the Need

NetScout’s Sniffer and nGenius solutions work in combination with strategically deployed monitoring devices and continuous capture appliances to provide a cost-effective approach to managing the performance of key business applications that end users and customers rely on. The NetScout solutions support the most complex network configurations, including converged and MPLS networks, to deliver comprehensive, real-time network monitoring, application profiling, troubleshooting, capacity planning and user experience assurance capabilities to the network professional.

The flexibility of the NetScout Sniffer and nGenius systems enables visibility into the core, distribution and access layers of the network and across both LAN and high-speed WAN environments, including their associated virtual network segments (i.e., VLANs, PVCs and DLCIs). To meet the challenges associated with converged networks, NetScout displays virtual circuits and their associated QoS simultaneously, ensuring that data, voice and video applications are properly mapped to the right QoS class and that the network is properly configured to meet business needs. In addition, by utilizing site monitoring capabilities, investment services firms can gain complete visibility into remote locations on the MPLS network from a WAN perspective, providing the much needed application-level visibility for capacity planning and troubleshooting that is commonly masked with MPLS.

In short, NetScout Sniffer and nGenius solutions make it easy to maintain consistent real-time analysis and historical reporting of all traditional and market trading-specific applications, all conversations, link utilization and all hosts, regardless of the underlying transport technology in order to meet today’s tough network performance challenges.

Optimizing Performance of Latency-Sensitive Market Trading/Exchange Applications Identifying and analyzing response time, micro bursts and sequence gaps to ensure application availability

n An East Coast financial

institution was experiencing

intermittent delay with one of its

market data applications. Using

the nGenius System’s response

time analysis capabilities, they

were quickly able to determine

delay was attributable to the

server, not the network.

n SIAC, which runs the networks

and computer systems used by

NYSE and AMEX, uses Sniffer

distributed monitoring devices

to centrally monitor and manage

remote network locations.

When a customer experience

difficulty they use Sniffer filters

to observe and troubleshoot the

data streams.

APPLICATION NOTE | INVESTMENT INDUSTRY

The nGenius Performance Manager provides global market trading companies and exchanges with

n Real-time monitoring and historical reporting analysis (utilization, response time, hosts and conversations) of market trading applications, such as FIX, OPRA, MDP, PGM, etc.

n Ability to identify IP Multicast groups as unique business applications as well as view the interaction between publishers and groups

n Ability to view TIBCO statistics, including error traffic and retransmissions.

n Real-time microburst alarming

n Robust error detection, such as monitoring out-of-sequence packets /retransmissions in real time, and the ability to generate an alarm when the gap exceeds a pre-defined value

n Response time analysis which distinguishes network flight times verses application processing times

n Integrated application-level monitoring and analysis with continuous packet capture for robust, post-event data mining

n KPI-to-Flow-to-Packet approach to problem diagnosis for streamlined troubleshooting that lowers mean time to resolve (MTTR)

Broadest Visibility into Revenue-Impacting Market Trading Applications

NetScout’s Sniffer and nGenius solutions provide the most extensive visibility into network resources usage and in-depth application identification and analysis, recognizing, discovering, and monitoring all the applications in your network, including well-known applications; complex applications that use a range of ports, such as SAP, Citrix or .NET; custom applications designed specifically for your business; web-based applications identified by URLs; and next-generation communication applications, such as VoIP, video, instant messaging, and peer to peer.

Market trading/exchange applications monitored “out of the box” include Fix Order Single, FIX Other, MDP, PGM, CTS, CQS, OPRA and Multicast Push and Monitoring. (See Figure 1 for a complete list).

Optimize Performance of Critical Market Trading Applications with Response Time Analysis

Response time is a primary indicator of network or application service quality and often the primary complaint of end users regarding the network. Tracking and isolating the sources of application response time problems are crucial because in trading transactions, milliseconds are worth millions. The NetScout solution provides application response time metrics specifically for the market trading applications listed in Table 1. Response time analysis is provided with up to one-minute granularity to aid in establishing financial network services at the appropriate quality levels.

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Figure 1

Market trading applications monitored “out

of the box” by the nGenius Solution include:

APPLICATION NOTE | INVESTMENT INDUSTRY

Proactive Performance Management with Sophisticated Problem Detection and Alarming

Studies show that in 50% to 75% of the cases, network problems are discovered by users of the network. When dealing with an application where degradations of milliseconds could severely impact the financial outcome, more effective approaches are necessary. Maintaining network performance for critical trading applications means detecting, diagnosing and rectifying issues that may impede their delivery. In market trading firms, this means identifying problems with packet loss, out-of-sequence packets, latency or delay at the earliest possible moment. The NetScout Solution is well positioned to monitor all the traffic in the network to quickly recognize these network degradations:

n Track and alert on packet loss

n Detect gaps in the sequence numbers for such protocols as OPRA, MDP, and PGM, and generate an alarm when the gap exceeds a user-configurable value

n Identify network microbursts when traffic rates exceed a millisecond threshold for specified length of time and send an alarm to nGenius Performance Manager and/or a third party management system, such as HP Network Node Manager (NNM), HP Operations Manager and HP Business Availability Center (BAC) or IBM Tivoli NetView, Tivoli Enterprise Console and Netcool/OMNIbus.

Conclusion

Market trading and exchange applications are the lifeblood for investment services organizations, thus their performance receives a great deal of attention. NetScout’s Sniffer and nGenius Solutions are uniquely positioned to provide comprehensive visibility into a broad range of market trading applications, as well as their

associated hosts and conversations, response time performance, packet capture and decode, early warning alarming, and historical reporting and trending. Armed with real-time and historical evidence from their own network’s day-to-day operations, IT organizations are better able to reduce MTTR as they troubleshoot degradations, respond to emerging utilization and performance problems, and plan for future bandwidth changes.

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Microburst alarms are available in real-time, provide the application and conversation details for the microburst contributors, and allow you to drill down into the specific packets for the alarm time window.

About NetScout SystemsNetScout Systems provides advanced network and application service assurance solutions that deliver complete visibility into real-time, packet/flow-based operational intelligence. IT operators at the world’s largest enterprises, government agencies, and service providers use the Sniffer and nGenius solutions to troubleshoot service degradations faster and more efficiently in order to reduce MTTR.

Our world-renowned Sniffer and nGenius solutions include:

n Intelligent Data Sources for high capacity, deep-packet recording and monitoring

n Analysis Software for real-time and historical network and application performance management, trouble-shooting, capacity planning, and reporting

n Advanced Intelligence for early detection and in-depth analysis of complex or specialized application services

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Case Studies

Some examples of how investment services firms are using the nGenius solution include:

n Reliability and uptime are absolutely essential for SIAC, the subsidiary that runs the computer systems and communications networks that power the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and the American Stock Exchange (Amex). In addition to the massive quantity of trades SIAC settles – about 40 megabits of data per second – much of SIAC’s volume is multicast traffic which is used to distribute real-time stock market quotes to more than 200 parties, including news and wire services that redistribute them to thousands of corporate clients.

Using Sniffer distributed monitoring devices, SIAC is able to remotely monitor and manage every line on its network from central monitoring locations, just as if they had a team of technicians on site. If a customer is having a communication problem, they can focus all of their resources on that customer’s line to quickly pinpoint and resolve the problem. In situations like this, they use Sniffer filters to observe individual data streams coming in from a customer, with a very fine level of granularity, and monitor individual conversations with SIAC’s application systems.

n An East Coast financial institution was experiencing intermittent delay problems with one of its market data applications and users were starting to complain. Using the nGenius Solution, they investigated the application response time and saw that the delay was attributable to the server, not the network. In a few short clicks, they were able to determine that all the clients were pointed at one particular server. The server was overwhelmed by the sheer number of the client connections and requests for data and became a bottleneck. Once network operations identified the problem, the support team was able to redirected the clients to the correct source for production data.