Monitoring or how to prevent server crashes

Author: Ivan Egorov

Today, we’d like to talk about monitoring your brokerage, hedge fund, or prop trading company. There’s a lot you can do without having to install, configure, and maintain a huge, separate monitoring system.

Why is nobody monitoring their environments?

From our experience at TFB, the answer is simple. Monitoring isn’t sexy. It’s not AI or new unique tricks, such as synthetic symbols. Monitoring reminds us of insurance, and insurance reminds us about all the bad things that can possibly happen. And if there’s one thing we don’t want, it’s to be reminded about all the potential risks and disasters that could be looming.

Why everybody should be monitoring their environments

As unattractive as monitoring can be, the importance of it can’t be overestimated.

Quite often, the TFB support team receives calls for help from brokers whose server and trading platforms are at the breaking point or, more often, they’re already starting to break, manifesting through freezes and crashes. The majority of those issues could have easily been prevented.

Yet, without ongoing monitoring, there’s little chance of spotting those issues, especially if the brokerage is on the smaller side or deals with very large volumes. There’s simply no way to keep up with everything manually, and the risk of missing an issue can be fatal. Unfortunately, some clients who weren’t keeping up with their systems faced major reputation and financial losses, and some of them had to shut down.

Timely monitoring can, for example, spot and signal problems with:

• Price feed
• Execution
• Trading platform
• Hosting servers

Imagine having an issue with quotes or failed executions, and finding out about it from angry clients who are bombarding your phones and messenges. Not a good look for anybody, especially in the financial sector which is unforgiving and ruthless.

Instead, brokers can do proactive monitoring and set up thresholds and alerts to help them stay on top of everything.

Monitoring will require some time and effort on your end, but in return, you will have peace of mind, and the chance to save yourselves from a lot of trouble and financial losses in the future.

Monitoring is not only for the bad things

Something that many misunderstand about monitoring, is that it can be used to track positive events and potential opportunities. It’s not all about issues, problems, and disasters.

If you track everything 24/7, you get a lot of data that can be used to track patterns and spot trends. With that information, companies can optimise their risk management and other strategies, and boost profits.

Okay, I’m sold. Where do I start with monitoring?

Let’s say you’re convinced that monitoring is a must. What’s next? Well, there are several ways you can set up your monitoring with Tools for Brokers.

Basic monitoring

Track the general condition of all your trading infrastructure’s components and get notified about major events, such as loss of connection with a liquidity provider, and issues with overall connection or hosting.

Monitoring and alerts built into Trade Processor

In addition to everything mentioned above, the Trade Processor liquidity bridge gives brokers the flexibility to choose what key events they want to be notified about via SMS, email, or messenger.

Here, for example, clients can be notified when:

• Order execution experiences an issue, such as order rejection
• The quote stream stops for one or several symbols
• A quote gets filtered by a gap/incorrect quote filtration
• Execution switches from primary to backup liquidity

With this type of monitoring, you get to know what’s happening to your most critical operations and avoid major issues, such as incorrect quotes and gaps, with strategically important services.

Advanced monitoring

At TFB, we also offer advanced monitoring services for clients who want to stay on top of everything environment-related, such as:

• If the client runs out of space on the server
• CPU overload
• Other crucial server performance parameters

Being one step ahead with advanced monitoring means that clients can prevent freezes, delays, and system overload. Instead of dealing with devastating consequences, they will be ready to prevent disasters and complaints from clients.

Note: The advanced monitoring option is an extra service and is provided to TFB clients at an additional cost.