The smooth uninterrupted electronic services that sales and traders rely on to keep clients happy is dependent on much behind-the-scenes effort by IT teams. Monitoring of, and across, applications at every level of the IT stack is vital to be able to troubleshoot potential issues before they happen. Monitoring can be done in various environments and can create a plethora of metrics relating to any level of the IT stack depending on the tools used, but in this article, GreySpark and ITRS explain a concept that is growing increasingly important in the capital markets, Application Production Monitoring.
Over the last decade, IT estates within capital markets firms have grown enormously. Buy versus build decisions for firms have mostly come down to whether the firm felt that the platform or application it needed to replace had, or could, provide it with competitive advantage in trading. If it did not – and monitoring falls firmly into this category – the firm most often selected the cheaper option. This was often to buy a third-party vendor solution. The number of IT monitoring tools proliferated as a consequence, each with a slight twist on the offerings of its competitors, and choosing the optimal solution became more of a challenge. A sinuous, complex landscape of performance monitoring developed as a consequence in many firms.
Trading application monitoring, in particular, can generate reems of log files and other monitoring data that essentially obfuscates the real problems that IT teams need to focus on. A monitoring tool landscape that delivers duplicated metrics and omits useful metrics from other parts of the IT stack leaves IT teams struggling to discern why things have gone wrong in their trading application stack. For IT support teams attempting to identify issues before they escalate, too much data is almost as much of a challenge as too little.
What firms need, in many cases, is a holistic monitoring solution that can garner the necessary metrics at every layer of the IT stack in the production environment, organise the data into a form that helps firms prevent issues arising, rather than investigate them after the fact.
A term for this, growing in use across the industry, is Application Production Monitoring. This describes the holistic full-stack real-time monitoring of related applications, associated infrastructure and all the underlying components of the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) stack to determine the overall health of the software and hardware relating to that application. Used by Support Teams and Application Owners in the production environment, the best Application Production Monitoring tools will draw this data together into one user-friendly dashboard.
Applications Performance Monitoring Versus Applications Production Monitoring
Application Performance Monitoring should not be confused with Application Production Monitoring (see Figure 1), as the former can refer to monitoring that delivers metrics relating to the performance of the application layer of an application’s OSI stack (see Figure 2). Application Performance Monitoring describes the monitoring of applications in staging or UAT environments to inform code reviews and optimisation. The metrics calculated are used primarily by development teams, DevOps and site reliability engineers (SREs) during the process of application development. Application Performance Monitoring tools create metrics on code-level performance of the runtime application architecture, client experience monitoring, business transactions and component monitoring. This approach has its place, but it does not allow full observability of the application and its dependencies in the production environment.
