Energy trading needs more than traditional monitoring
Power and gas markets now run at the speed and complexity of capital markets, but the way many firms monitor them hasn’t kept pace. Here’s what we’re hearing from the market, and what catching up looks like.
Trading is moving faster
In October 2025, Europe’s coupled power markets switched from hourly to 15-minute products across 27 countries. EPEX SPOT traded a record 917.5 TWh that year. In Germany, quarter-hour products now carry more than half of continuous intraday volume, and the order book clears around 1.35 million trades a day, three and a half times the 2023 level.
Add tighter reporting deadlines under REMIT II and NIS2’s treatment of energy operators as essential entities, and the operational stakes are rising. Banks made this shift to electronic, always-on trading more than two decades ago. Energy firms are making it now.
What we’re hearing
Across conversations with oil majors’ trading arms, commodity traders, utilities and industry practitioners, the same themes keep coming up:
Monitoring is per application, not per trade. You can know every component is running and still not know whether the trade made it through correctly. A trade doesn’t have to fail to be wrong.
Breaks are found by hand. Some teams reconcile exchange files against internal databases, sometimes a day later. Others want automated readiness checks and live reconciliation between trade capture and risk.
Visibility stops at the firm’s edge. After execution, a trade moves through confirmations, grid operators, back office and regulators. One fault can surface as many symptoms.
Traders spot it first. The desk often notices before IT does. That’s exactly what better observability should change.
The same discipline, a different mix
Energy trading doesn’t need fundamentally different monitoring from financial trading. It needs the same discipline. What differs is the mix: physical delivery, cloud-based ETRMs alongside on-premise operational technology, and workflows such as weather, forecasting, scheduling and settlement that run on longer cycles. The goal is observability at the speed each workflow requires.
What catching up looks like
Trade-level visibility: following each trade end to end, so the question becomes “is anything missing, and where?” rather than “is the server up?”
Hybrid coverage: one view across on-premise and cloud systems, venues and counterparties.
Speed where it counts: sub-second visibility for algorithmic intraday trading, a sensible cadence elsewhere.
Complement existing tools: working alongside existing ETRMs and tools rather than ripping them out.
Predictable cost: licensing models that firms can forecast, rather than a model that penalises them for monitoring more.
Where ITRS sees this heading
ITRS has spent more than two decades monitoring mission-critical trading environments for many of the world’s largest banks and exchanges using Geneos. Energy and commodities trading is now one of the fastest-growing markets seeking to adopt the same technology.
The shift means moving beyond just monitoring and truly knowing where every trade is where it should be, with the right data, at the right time.