Infrastructure Provider

The Best Visibility, Analytics And Reporting When Speed Really Matters

Corvil is regarded as the “best in class” solution by financial market participants and venues for monitoring, analyzing and assuring infrastructure health and performance. Therefore infrastructure service providers that use Corvil and provide reporting and service level agreements based on Corvil are viewed positively and more likely to win business from financial markets clients.

Problem Overview

Financial markets clients are major consumers of connectivity, bandwidth, data and co-location services provided by infrastructure service providers. Critical applications for these services include order execution and market data distribution. Competition is tough in this market with an increasingly undifferentiated service offering. This often leads to price erosion and commoditization. In addition, service providers must keep up with exponentially increasing traffic volumes associated with these services. This requires constant upgrading of capacity without a corresponding increase in client revenue. Traditional NPM and APM tools used by service providers are not able to meet the unique needs of financial markets clients. These tools lack the granularity, analytics, and accuracy demanded by financial markets clients and information provided by service providers in terms of monitoring, SLAs, troubleshooting, and upgrade recommendations are often not trusted and/or ignored. Quite often the financial markets clients have Corvil installed and are able to tell more about the quality of the service than the provider themselves.

Solution Overview

Corvil taps into the packet data flowing through the service provider network providing a real-time authoritative view of all client and service traffic with nanosecond timestamped packet precision. Corvil passively captures, timestamps, decodes, correlates and analyzes the packet data flows, in real-time, with zero impact on the performance of the network. The result is a real-time picture of the latency, performance and capacity utilization of the client services and underlying network infrastructure. Operations personnel are alerted pro-actively when problems arise, and Corvil provides a sophisticated suite of analytics for detecting and troubleshooting specific issues related to financial markets clients e.g. microbursts, data gaps, relative latency, zero TCP window, one-way latency or loss. Corvil has comprehensive support for time synchronization including PTP, PPS and Corvil’s proprietary self-synchronization protocol.

Outcomes

  • Competitively differentiate service offering for financial clients
  • Upsell higher grade services with trusted evidence of need
  • Assure latency SLAs of critical services e.g. market data distribution
  • Quickly respond to client queries about service quality issues
  • See all client activity and infrastructure performance in real-time
  • Slash time to troubleshoot and fix service quality problems

"Our ability to manage and monitor all activity and incidents in real-time is critical to our business and to our clients' business. We use Corvil’s real-time IT data analytics platform to assure the highest quality of service for our clients."

JARROD YUSTER, CEO
PICO QUANTITATIVE TRADING


Manage Clients

  • Demonstrate latency SLA compliance
  • Provide full transparency hop by hop
  • Quickly respond to client queries
  • Offer evidence of upgrade need

Manage IT Systems

  • Monitor latency of feeds hop by hop
  • Monitor latency of order flow hop by hop
  • Detect and report gaps in data feeds
  • Proactively alert clients to service issues

Manage Infrastructure

  • Monitor real-time microburst utilization
  • Detect service impacting loss events
  • Correctly determine bandwidth need
  • Quickly troubleshoot root cause

"Our clients are looking for new ways to remove operational risk from their trading systems. The addition of Corvil’s solutions to our BT Radianz services offers clients greater insight into latency and network performance analytics that can impact their trading quality."

JERRY HUBBARD, MANAGING DIRECTOR
BT RADIANZ

Trade Performance Analytics

Fill Rate - Order tracking state is used to monitor the success or failure of orders through the fill-rate calculation - the percentage of the request volume that was filled.

Tick To Order - Calculates the algorithm response latency – the time from receipt of the triggering tick to the transmission of the order.

Order To Tick - Calculates the venue response latency – the time from transmission of an order to receipt of tick update on the venue feed reflecting the trade.

Order Response - Calculates the venue order response latency – the time from transmission of an order to receipt of acknowledgment of the order from the venue.

Microburst Analysis - Calculates the volume of a specified metric for short-timescales, e.g. the number of messages received in 1ms.

Gap Detection - Track the sequence numbers of all multicast market data feeds, and use this tracking to report and alert on any gaps.

Relative Latency - Calculates the relative latency between two measured events with time-stamps from a common time reference.

Bandwidth Protection - Calculates an estimate of the amount of bandwidth need to meet a quality of service objective for a given traffic load e.g. a market data feed.