9th May 2012
As we suspected it has never been more important for ITRS clients to fully understand the end-to-end transaction flow in a world of interlinked markets and increasing financial regulation. And the webinar we held in the 3 May proved it. We were delighted to find that we had over 170 registrants for this run through three case studies on how Geneos has been configured to support transaction flows for business and operations users in:
Our Geneos pre-sales experts in the form of Harjit Hothi and Manesh Tailor were put through their paces by two external ‘X-Factor’ judges from RBS: Tim Carey – global head of listed execution production and Neil Leeson – release manager for RBS.
With over 70% of the respondents seeing transaction performance monitoring moving up the priority list, perhaps we shouldn’t have been surprised by the large audience for this transaction focused webinar.
What did we find out?
The case studies reviewed different aspects of transaction performance monitoring and the conundrum of the need to not only count message as they flow round the trade lifecycle but also interpret them. 70% of the webinar attendees polled agreed (or strongly agreed) that the content of transactions had to be unwrapped to determine if the trading infrastructure was really working. And this in turn presents its own challenge; unwrapping transactions using software can take time - so how do you square this with the need to keep pace with rising trade volumes? Tim Carey’s answer was that at some point you need to decide how much you want to invest in the technology and infrastructure to support full discovery.
This is an interesting alternative approach to the industry drive for Big Data projects to support predictive APM projects, which rapidly get complex and perhaps don’t necessarily tell you that much more from an intraday operations and incident management perspective. For many business lines, good transaction sampling can be just as revealing as full discovery but can be accomplished at a fraction of the technology cost - see below for an example of this approach in action.
Excel doesn’t do it
The Clearing Services case study involved continuous sampling of a central batch file, using Geneos Adaptive Rules to determine what normal was for the last 20 days and then automatically set fine-tuned alerts across multiple markets and 00’s of clients. We posed an extreme example for the attendees, which was could they manage this type of analysis using more generic tools such as Excel? Probably not surprisingly 80% of the webinar attendees strongly disagreed – even though the case study example was actually sourcing the data from a single batch file. In discussion the problem was that almost whatever analysis tool you selected, it would tie up at least two full time staff just to manage this monitoring process alone; as a production solution it simply wouldn’t scale.
Our thanks to everyone who attended webinar and the panel of experts who joined us on the day. You can find out more about our transaction monitoring solutions here.
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