Financial Systems

Trading Systems allow users to send trades to exchanges and brokers, provide  position keeping, settlement, reporting and some degree of financial risk management.  The Geneos set of plug-ins that monitor and manage Trading Systems is called TradeWatch.

Geneos supports GL Trade (including Clearvision) , Fidessa, ORC, Sunguard BRASS,  ULLink, PATS and Trading Technologies.

Trading Systems connect to electronic exchanges via exchange provided servers and Geneos  supports a large number of those servers too.

Trading information flows (order, confirmations, executions) are mostly routed between banks , brokers and clients by FIX Engines.  Geneos supports major FIX Engines (Appia and Cameron).  In addition Geneos has a number of generic FIX plug-ins allow Geneos to monitor FIX conversations in a configurable way.

Geneos has a set of plug-ins that monitor and manage direct exchange connectivity. Geneos supports large number of exchanges by either by deploying a specific plug-in on the bank-side server or by monitoring the logical connection to the exchange at the application level.

Geneos manages and monitors FIX engines and protocols on two levels – Technology Level and Business Level.  At the Technology Level Geneos monitors health and presence of FIX conversations, and FIX engine health. At the Business Level Geneos monitors message latency and key statistics about the messages. 

Market Data Systems

Market Data Systems make market information (prices, trades, volumes) available in real-time to traders. The Geneos set of plug-ins that monitor and manage Market Data Systems is called NetAgent.

Geneos supports Market Data Systems (mostly dominated by Reuters RMDS), stand-alone market data servers (Reuters+ and Bridge Feed), contribution servers (Gissing) and ticker plants (Wombat). 

Geneos is also able to monitor message propagation latency between different parts of Market Data System – for example, between a source of data in NY and consumers of that data in Tokyo, Hong Kong and London.

In addition Geneos can monitor data from multiple exchanges, or multiple feeds from one exchange to determine which one is faster.

Order Flow Latency

Geneos is able to monitor latency of orders and confirmations between multiple check points.   The Geneos set of plug-ins that do this is called ixWATCH.

This functionality is considered critical by most top-tier banks as  they strive to reduce the time it takes to process orders electronically.   The latency directly affects their ability to be market leaders and to enroll and maintain their clients.

Middleware

Geneos provides comprehensive early warning type monitoring for Oracle, Sybase, Informix and Microsoft SQL Server.

Messaging and Queuing systems

Middleware is a term used to describe systems and applications that provide a common way of delivering data messages between user applications. Geneos supports most middleware systems used by financial institutions. These include TIB Rendezvous (RV), TIB EMS, IBM MQ.

Citrix

Citrix software provides the facility to run desktop type applications on a server farm and make the GUI available to the desktop users. Geneos monitors key Citrix server parameters.

Infrastructure

A set of universal plug-ins monitor key operating parameters of a server (Linux, Solaris, AIX, HP-UX  and Windows). These include processes, log file keywords, cpu, disk , low level devices, shared memory, time synchronization, operating system versions among many others.

SNMP

SNMP based plug-ins are able to remotely poll health status of network devices (routers, bridges) and servers. These plug-ins are used when the local monitoring option is not available.

Geneos has a set of plug-ins to monitor Web servers, specifically by requesting a set of configured pages, checking that the pages are supplied, while monitoring the time it takes.

Geneos provides universal network monitoring capability via a set of plug-ins called eXset. They use standard network protocols (TCP/IP, UDP, multicast etc) to check availability of a remote device (such as router) or a server, check the route network traffic is taking and the delay at each stage of the route, monitor traffic levels for specific conversation or traffic levels generated by broadcasting or multicasting applications.

For example,  eXset plug-in can monitor whether there is a reasonable level of conversation present between an Order Management System and an exchange during exchange open hours.  

Geneos provides a plug-in to monitor the health and key management metrics of Veritas Cluster Server.

VMWare

Geneos provides a plug-in to monitor the health and key management metrics of VMWare.

Grid

Grid Computing systems employs a large number, hundreds and sometimes thousands, of servers working together to provide computing power to solve complex trading algorithms as the market moves. Geneos has plug-ins to monitor these.