The problem

With more business going through electronic channels it’s becoming increasingly important to have an effective means of monitoring traffic through your FIX environment. This could be to ensure session uptime, to weed out badly formatted messages, to find potential delays in message transmission or just to have a better view of your FIX environment.

Relying on business users alerting your support teams about issues is one approach. This however is not ideal. An alternative, more proactive approach is to actively monitor every single message sent and received through your FIX environment. This approach means that you are not just reacting to problems but are actively seeking them out and resolving them before they impact your dealers.

Current manual methods of FIX environment monitoring and issue resolution can be cumbersome. Locating FIX log files, ensuring you have the correct permissions to directories, waiting for log files to open up in a text editor, finding the correct messages within the log file and then trying to figure out what a FIX message actually means can take several minutes at best. The manual approach also requires staff with FIX protocol experience and is unnecessary, wasteful and importantly it is avoidable.

The solution

To take the pressure off your support teams and increase efficiency, some businesses are turning to software solutions for their FIX environment monitoring. An application that monitors all FIX traffic, alerts support teams of issues such as disconnects and badly formatted messages and allows for quick retrieval and analysis of FIX messages. Such solutions reduce the amount of time to resolve issues in a number of ways.

Firstly by reducing the amount of time to retrieve and view messages. Support staff will be given access to a desktop application that opens instantly and gives immediate access to FIX messages. FIX messages will be processed as soon as they are logged and will be available to support teams to view and analyse thereafter.

Secondly, a software solution will enrich the display of FIX messages to allow users with limited FIX protocol experience to be able to understand the FIX message. This saves a lot of time as users will not have to look up tag definitions and values from websites, all this information will be instantly available.

Software solutions will also provide advanced email functionality, being able to alert users as soon as pre-defined criteria are encountered. Support teams will be alerted as soon as a message is seen that satisfies these pre-defined criteria. Support teams will no longer have to wait for their business users to raise issues.

To find out how Cynapps IntelliFIX can help your business please contact us.