ITRS Group

Coordinated global view of all systems

Although dedicated to delivering a quick response to changing business needs, Marshall Wace, one of Europe’s leading hedge fund managers, had no visibility across the trade lifecycle and was struggling to manage email system alerts effectively as a result.

Visibility across the trade lifecycle

“It was information overload,” admits Chris Stanton, co-head of development. “No visibility across the trade lifecycle meant the operations team might see problems in their area if there was a fault in execution, but not know the reason.”

When the firm looked for suitable tools to filter and manage alerts, it found many monitoring systems were focused around monitoring infrastructure such as servers. Those that could monitor applications through log files didn’t provide much in the way of coordination or automation.

Confidence in Geneos

The firm selected ITRS Geneos to provide a coordinated global view of all its systems. “It was pretty clear that Geneos would suit our needs,” Stanton says. “Having used it for a month, we were confident we could get it monitoring everything we needed and with the level of coordination we required.”

Geneos monitors Marshall Wace’s entire infrastructure and applications estate, consisting of around 100 applications running across 150 virtualised Windows and Unix servers in three locations. Since its introduction, Marshall Wace has managed to rectify issues before trading opens that, in the past, would have involved losing some trading time. Another benefit has been the ability to personalise the solution, for example setting alerts to be triggered only when something happens three times within a certain period.

Quantum leap in monitoring

 “Geneos has provided a quantum leap in terms of pulling everything together,” says Stanton. “Because it's a common platform, everyone's much more of aware of what's going on around the IT plant. We can be more proactive about identifying who’s impacted by an issue and then alert the people affected. Developers have seen the benefit of not having to monitor their own applications, no longer being called out in the night to fix issues, and of being able to get on with development rather than fixes during the day.”