As firms engage in initiatives to drive down cost across all business units, senior management is once again targeting additional savings in infrastructure reductions. This directive has pushed many firms to reduce their infrastructure based on “benchmarking and monitoring” using rudimentary and inappropriately configured monitoring tools.
Problem Statement
Most monitoring utilities only have the ability to show “high level” metrics of market data infrastructures but they are being masqueraded as “detailed” visualization tools. Making an informed decision based on this type of data presents a false and dangerous perception that additional capacity exists, and infrastructure can be reduced. Not having a complete holistic, detailed view of your market data infrastructure and an accurate view of your capacity will lead to catastrophic failures taking your firm out of the market.
Example of Inadequate Monitoring Tools
Network Bandwidth Example
(All chart samples below are taking at the same time period.)
Network Bandwidth measured at 10-second intervals look like there is very minimal network bandwidth being used. Spikes up to 148Mb per second are the peaks identified in the chart below. This chart could suggest reducing infrastructure capacity is appropriate to reduce cost by using lower class hardware, reduced hardware footprint, or virtualization.
Network Bandwidth measured at 1-second intervals look like there is very minimal bandwidth being used. Spikes up to 710Mb per second which don’t fully justify upgrading of server hardware, network hardware/interfaces to 10G, or even upgrading the switches. The inadequate collection below still implies a relatively “safe” environment.
When proper market data monitoring of Network Bandwidth is performed at 100ms intervals, accurate information is now presented and there is clearly a significant amount of bandwidth being used which can impact an incorrectly sized / configured production environment. Spikes up to 2.2 Gb per second are clearly in the range of concern for strained infrastructures. This type of detailed data is not shown on inferior or inappropriate monitoring tools but clearly warrant an upgrade to a 10G infrastructure.
SOLUTION – How West Highland Addresses this Problem
Keep your infrastructure protected. Deploy not only the best monitoring utilities that can provide you sub-second statistics, but have the data verified by true experts that understand all the moving parts and how they impact each other.
Anything less than sub-second monitoring will keep you blind to what is going on in the market and the impact to your infrastructure. West Highland tools and Data Science team can help you deploy the best tools to monitor critical metrics in your Market Data Infrastructure as well as provide a low-cost 24 hour enhanced monitoring solution that fits your business.
Please contact sales@westhighland.net to schedule a call with our team to discuss our findings in more detail.