Trading System Monitor (TSM), written in 1995, is targeted at supporting Swiss banks which trade Swiss equities, bonds and derivatives on the Swiss Stock Exchange (SWX).

Below is the management summary which was written at the time the product was first launched.

Due to the specific targeting of the product many of the terms and acronyms used will only be understood by managers and administrators familiar with the electronic Swiss Stock Exchange and Trading System.

The product was so successful that the Swiss Stock Exchange itself purchased enough licenses to be able to offer to each member of the exchange several copies of the product.

TSM has been in production at over 50 Swiss bank sites since 1995.

 
     

Trading System Monitor

A performance and availability monitor for the Trading System

Management Summary

 

 

Trading System Monitor (TSM) is an early warning system that monitors the health of Trading System resources and alerts system managers to potential problems before the integrity of the system is affected. For example: failure to refresh the Kerberos keys overnight, or a critical shortage of space remaining in the Sybase database.

The TSM Graphical User Interface shows in a clear colour-coded overview the status of all monitored resources, minimising the time needed for system management checks. From up-close or from across the room, a single glance is sufficient to tell that the system is working well and has no problems. Similarly, as soon as an alert occurs the immediate change of display colour is clearly visible and triggers the system managers to react

Individual popup-windows are supplied for each resource. These allow detailed tracking for resources of particular interest, and are also intended to aid in problem diagnosis. For example:

  • Kerberos: shows the Julian date that each of the seven keys were last refreshed, and the date that the last refresh was expected.
  • Sybase-space: plots a graph showing how the free space has varied over the previous hours
  • Streams: lists the names of streams that are delayed or down

Coupled with this is a comprehensive audit-log and mailing capability designed to provide 'hands-off' monitoring with 24-hour coverage. If auditing is enabled, then all alerts are timestamped and written to an on-disk audit log as soon as they occur. At the same time, a mail message can optionally be sent to notify users of the event.

The system is highly configurable. The thresholds for alerts can be configured on a per-resource basis. Alarms can be configured in groups or individually. Similarly, the users who are to receive the alarms can also be configured in groups or individually (including pagers). The mail system is integrated with the auditing system so that whenever an alarm is audited, part of the audit record is a list of users who were sent a mail notification.

TSM is designed to have minimal impact on the system performance. The Trading System server machines barely register either a CPU or disk cost, and as the TSM GUI is not itself a MOA only one MAPI connection is consumed regardless of how many GUIs are started.

TSM does not duplicate or replace the functionality provided in the SMI, it supplements it with a large range of additional monitoring capabilities.

Highlights

  • Available on SUN Solaris and DEC UNIX
  • Very easy to install, configure and run
  • Minimal performance impact
  • Over 40 different resources monitored
  • Fully configurable warning and error alert thresholds for each resource
  • Integrated and configurable mail & audit functionality
  • Fully configurable GUI display layout
  • Standard configurations provided for dual and single server systems