Multinational Financial Services Corporation Protects Performance of Financial Transactions with NETSCOUT

Customer Profile

This large multinational financial services corporation is in the business of managing financial exchanges and marketplaces. The corporation also offers end-to-end data services and solutions to support the trading, investment, risk management, and connectivity needs of customers across major asset classes. Thousands of employees work out of offices around the world transforming global markets and generating revenue of more than $3 billion dollars annually. Financial trading is highly dependent on the digital environment for research, customer relationship management and trading execution, thus the performance of their hybrid cloud environment is extremely important.

The Challenge

This organization’s biggest challenge was delivering a seamless monitoring experience despite rapid growth and multiple business acquisitions. There was a real need to standardize on a single solution that met all their needs to gain end-to-end visibility across the organization and assure service quality. NetOps additionally needed actionable intelligence based on current application activity and performance to help them plan for sufficient capacity to accommodate unpredictable trading markets traffic.

As a financial services organization, it’s critical to have visibility into any connectivity issues end-users may experience on the trading platform. Missing a stock trade, even by milliseconds, could cost end-users millions of dollars. Visibility throughout the hybrid cloud environment was also needed to help research and resolve end-user’s trade disputes with the various trading platforms.

Solution in Action

To address these challenges, this organization turned to NETSCOUT®. Over time the data centers from recent acquisitions have been consolidated, and the NETSCOUT solution has been implemented to provide visibility into the environment to assure service quality. The IT team deployed InfiniStreamNG appliances strategically throughout their datacenters to provide end-to-end visibility into their production environment.

The smart data generated by these data sources is converted into smarter analytics by the nGenius® Service Assurance platform. Extracted from rich wire data, these metrics are displayed in a series of custom service dashboards, providing at-a-glance views and analysis into critical stock trading and research protocols such as FIX, ITCH, and OUCH. Multicast traffic and microburst transactions are also important to see. Seamless contextual workflows can take the IT team from a high-level dashboard view down into session analysis of an individual transaction in just two clicks.

Custom built nGeniusONE service dashboards help the operations teams stay ahead of issues with alerts to issues as they emerge so they can resolve before customers are impacted by such problems and trading platform access or other performance issues. Smart actionable analytics are helping the IT team maintain the performance necessary to evaluate and meet expectations of contracted partners and customers. Ensuring service performance for trades executed and that they occurred at specific times is an ongoing task as customers question trade timing throughout the current day as well as trades that executed in the past.

The nGeniusONE platform is now used by the operations team to resolve customer connectivity issues to the trading platforms, customer trade disputes with the various trading platforms, along with other day to day network and application issues. The network engineering team also uses the burst advisor feature of nGeniusONE as a capacity planning tool to ensure that the network has sufficient bandwidth available to support the demands of the business.