Observability – Choosing The Best Time To Retire Tech – Data Protection

Accurate Data Is Mandatory Before Extending Server
Lifespan

Last year, two of the three largest cloud providers, Google
Cloud and Amazon AWS, extended their server lifespans and Waters
Technology reached out to discuss the often-overlooked topic1 . It
is a universal subject all IT engineers are familiar with and was
good to see it highlighted. In the case of AWS, the decision makes
good business sense as the company subsequently expects to generate
an envious extra $900m per quarter. For firms in the capital
market, this is a 24×7 subject and focus from a capacity management
aspect and is a cornerstone of CJC’s managed services and IT
analytics platform – mosaicOA2 .

The Challenge of Market Data Capacity Management

Market data consumption and the capital markets create unique
capacity management challenges, doubling every two years and is
capable of spiking over a millisecond or triple in a day due to
market volatility. For example, in the early 2000s, CJC saw Market
Data Message Rates between 50-65 billion per day at firms (figure
1). In 2024, this now easily exceeds 170 billion. However, notice
at times like COVID-19 and US elections – “Normal”
2024 message rate levels were already seen during volatile 2020
periods. This is a normal occurrence in the capital markets.

Aside from market volatility, capital markets are unique in that
it has a concept of market opening and closing. Most capital market
servers are “asleep” during weekends and evenings when
close to no activity takes place. For example, it is easy to
distinguish the days, weekends and even holiday periods in Figure 2
(below) but the downtime wreaks havoc on forecast projections.

Is Extending Server Lifespans Safe?

IT managers have often resorted to formulas to work around
capacity. For example, investing in servers with the highest
specification and networking possible with the latest software
deployed, monitoring key application and hardware metrics –
refreshing every 3 years. Gambling on extending server lifespan is
a potentially dangerous game and accurate data is mandatory before
proceeding.

The major cloud providers provide excellent server statistic
metrics and Chief Information Officer (CIO) dashboards, however,
the dashboards are usually unable to see inside the running market
data application. This is an example of an observability blind spot
that CJC’s Chief Technology Officer, Peter Williams, touched
on3 back in October. Generally, applications crash before a modern
CPU hits a high level and knowing these limits or when the system
will likely hit them is vital.

Obtaining Observability, Holistically

mosaicOA4 is capable of visualising and illustrating where
market data firms are, were, and will be from a capacity management
perspective. The data is stored indefinitely in a time-series
database, ensuring historical events (like COVID, US elections or
announcements) are recorded alongside the system impact.

The busy day view (Figure 3 below) displays both historical and
real-time system information, which provides context for the users
to know if they are higher/ lower than normal. In Figure 3, the
system experienced 8 billion more messages than normal and provided
hours or even weeks of advanced notice on a potential system
crash.

Additionally, mosaicOA dashboards also indicate which systems
are at risk, and which are not (figure 4,).

The Hot Server Plugin leveraged by mosaicOA uses “principal
component analysis5” to provide a server rating over time,
which identifies and highlights servers that are over or
under-utilised.

All these techniques combined and visualised in a single
interface provide IT managers and executives with the necessary
insights to instil system stability confidence with the potential
to extend server lifespan – or invest in new technologies.
Avoiding unnecessary costs and outages.

CJC’s managed services leverage mosaicOA and are procured
standalone as-aservice by clients to support RTDS, Exegy, Solace
and Kafka.

mosaicOA can be used to investigate environments on-premises or
in the cloud (Google, Azure, and AWS).

mosaicOA – Global Real-Time IT Monitoring and
Observability

mosaicOA is a powerful, cloud-based IT analytics SaaS Solution
that consolidates large data sets into a single interface. The
solution enables IT teams to easily analyse and gain valuable
insights into critical capital markets infrastructure. Features
include reporting, capacity and problem management.

Footnotes

1 Bowie M. (2024) “Amazon expects $900M+ per quarter
from extending server life” at
“https://www.waterstechnology.com/emerging-technologies/7951667/amazon-expects-900m-per-quarter-from-extending-server-life?
” [Accessed 06 February 2024].

2 CJC (2023) “Observability” at
“https://cjcit.com/services/observability/” [Accessed 06
February 2024].

3 CJC (2023) “TradingTech Panel: Buy & Build
– The Future of Capital Markets Technology” at
“https://cjcit.com/cjc-news/buy-build-capital-markets-technology/”
[Accessed 06 February 2024].

4 CJC (2023) “Monitoring” at
“https://cjcit.com/services/monitoring/” [Accessed 06
february 2024].

The content of this article is intended to provide a general
guide to the subject matter. Specialist advice should be sought
about your specific circumstances.

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