Tradeview™: High-Performance Monitoring of Market Data Feeds

Rapidly detecting degradation in the quality of data feeds is a considerable challenge for any market participants who use or transport real-time market feeds. Market data transport technology is primarily based around the use of multicast, which does not have any error correcting mechanisms at the network layer. This means that any packets containing key trade data that have been lost cannot be detected until they are passed through a feed handler system at the end user site. This has a number of issues:

• Application teams may be aware of the problem, but the tools they use may not be available available to the network operations teams who are responsible for diagnosing and resolving the issue.

• Many feed handlers use feed arbitration (between A and B feeds) to autocorrect message drops, so application teams may neither be aware of problems nor quickly pass-on details to their network operations teams.

• Detecting a problem at the feed handler does not tell you where the problem occurred. Was it a problem with the Exchange or Market Data Vendor’s ticker plant? Was it a problem in their internal network? Was there a problem in the third-party network carrier or extranet provider used to transfer the market data? Was there a problem in a firewall? Was the problem in the end user’s internal network?

All these questions lead to slow decision-making and long fault repair times that can be measured in days and not minutes. Much of the technology used to monitor this infrastructure today is either not up to the task or involves expensive data capture, storage, and analytic technologies that have remained more or less the same for twenty years. These technologies are expensive and consume valuable power and real estate within expensive data centers.

Highlights:-

•  High Performance. Uses advanced ASIC and FPGA technology for ultra-high performance. Real-time gap detection of up to 1000 simultaneous multicast channels. Total data analysis rate of 60 million market data messages per second. Detailed traffic statistics available on a feed by feed basis streamed off the device

•  Cost Effective. 1/2 the price and 5x faster than other traditional monitoring tools. Easily deployed across a network

•  Smart Filtering. Reduces the time to set up monitoring and capture tools

•  Integrated with Geneos NetprobeTM from ITRS. Delivers a simple, consolidated view of multicast sequence gaps and microburst events on any Geneos dashboard

•  Super Reliability. Not dependent on error prone, expensive servers. Wide range of predefined market data feeds

• Channel Health. monitors channel performance and alerts to anomalies, simplifying feed troubleshooting

Tradeview™ Solves These Challenges:-

TradeView is ideally-suited to wide-scale deployments and the cost-conscious customer that are not currently addressed by existing solutions. 

TradeView is a new type of device from Ixia that combines the most up-to-date ASIC and FPGA technologies to deliver high-performance monitoring of market data feeds. It almost-instantly detects multicast sequence gaps or microbursts. It can provide such analysis simultaneously on up to 4 x 10GE communication links or LAN segments, and at a price point approximately half of alternative approaches. In addition, TradeView can detect the absence of market data messages and stream a summary of traffic statistics and gaps to storage devices and management systems. 

One single TradeView alone has the capacity to monitor 60 million trade messages a second, 3 times more than the entire US equities and options markets combined. 

TradeView is one of a series of Ixia products designed for the financial industry. These products are specifically designed to provide wide-scale instrumentation of critical trading infrastructure.