ITRS have so far developed approximately 100 plug-ins to address the wide ranging needs of the financial markets. Some plug-in sets, such as NetAgent or TradeWatch are better known than Geneos itself.

Geneos has been adopted by banks as the de facto standard for managing and monitoring their trading systems. In most cases Geneos replaced in-house developed monitoring systems.

Key Advantages using Geneos

	Proactive system management Operational staff can be notified of an operational issue developing before it becomes an issue. This allows them, in most cases, to fix the issue and avoid the possibility of a major outage, which can loose banks millions of pounds or impact their reputation.
	Traders and Managers View Traders can be provided with a customised light weight view to show them the state of the business services they rely on. Management can see a summary view of the systems that their staff are responsible for.
	Single unified view Geneos provides a common way of monitoring and managing a large number of different trading systems. Operators do not need to know each system in detail in order to offer expert monitoring service.
	Capacity planning and trend analysis While monitoring the environment, Geneos stores metrics in a database. This database can be used to look back historically at, say, the latency of an exchange connection and correlate it with CPU utilisation over the last 3 months. This can, of course, be applied to any set of parameters. Armed with this information it becomes possible to identify whether some components are being overloaded and address this proactively by planned upgrades. Projections using historical data also allow for effective and accurate capacity planning. Historical information is also used to validate Service Level Agreements internally and with outsourcing organisations.
	"Follow the Sun" monitoring Geneos can be deployed globally in multiple locations with links to Operation Centres in specific geographic locations. Operations staff in any one of our client’s geographic locations can manage their systems and applications in all their other locations. Enabling this, Geneos allows our clients to implement "Follow the Sun" approach, where operational staff in one part of the world take over managing computer systems in the other part. For example,a London operator can take over looking after systems in Asia at the end of the day in Hong Kong. New York can take over from London etc.
	Current metrics are always available Geneos makes current values of all management metrics available to the users in real-time. In contrast, most other monitoring tools report fail and warning events only and show the current values when specifically requested by the user. Seeing events only is like driving a car with a speedometer showing green or red depending if a speed limit is exceeded or not, but not seeing the speed itself. Geneos allows the user to see the current speed as well as being notified when the speed limit is breached.
	Low footprint The local agent collects system metrics locally, avoiding expensive, in terms of network bandwidth, remote data polling. The agent uses less that 1% CPU, while maintaining a real-time cache of the metrics it collects. When metrics are sampled only updates to the cache are sent to the users. This greatly reduces the network traffic overhead. This is fundamental to the success of Geneos as it keeps the user network free for carrying critical trade data.
	Flexible Rule Manager Management metrics collected by the agents are analysed in order to help make informed decisions as to the nature of that data. Before the real-time management metrics are displayed to the user, the data is processed by the Rule Manager. The Rule Manager will validate updates to the current data values against a set of user configured rules. The rules govern the severity level of the data. This is displayed as either a Blue (Ignore), Green (ok), Amber (warning) or Red (Alarm) icon. The Rule Manager can trigger external events that result in an e-mail, SMS message or a message to other 3rd party application , such as HP Openview or Tivoli for example. The Rule Manager can also run actions that a user can configure, for example, a system or application recovery routine. A rule can be configured to be active only during defined intervals. For example, during a weekend or evening an exchange line may go down for maintenance, but this should not generate an e-mail alerting the support engineers at home.
	Open interface Geneos provides open interface, enabling 3rd parties and clients to write custom plug-ins. There is also an open interface to provide custom handing of the events generated by the Rule Manager.
	Cuts operational and reputation risk Geneos clients see a reduction in their support costs and reduction in their operational risk and reputation. Support costs go down because using Geneos, clients need fewer support staff to look after the systems. This is due to the efficiencies achieved in being proactive rather than reactive, also Geneos provides an easy to use interface into even the most complex applications. The support staff do not have to be highly skilled in each of the trading systems that the institution has, because of the unified view of the systems. Geneos reduces the risk of system outages resulting in fiscal loss and diminished market reputation as a result. If system outages do occur, Geneos enables the support staff to pin point the root cause of the issue, thus minimizing down time.
	Addresses regulatory requirements There is a major trend in banks to outsource their computer operation to remote data centres. New European regulation for financial services industry (MiFID) stipulates that institution can outsource their operations only if they can prove that they retain “command and control”. Geneos provides that "command and control" functionality.
	Ease of deployment Geneos is straightforward to deploy. Hundreds of servers and applications can be monitored within days rather than months, as with other monitoring tools.