LAMA: The Brokerage Firm’s Framework for Staying Ahead of the Curve

Brokerage firms are constantly under pressure to stay ahead of the competition. They need to make sure that they are using the latest technology and techniques to provide their clients with the best possible service. With constant advancements of technologies and integrations used by these brokerage systems, technical issues do arise.

With the increase in volumes of trading with retail trading, the National Stock Exchange of India (NSE) – one of the largest stock exchanges of the world, needed a system to prevent technical incidents and outages across different market participants.

To address these technical operational incidents Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) formed a working group. This SEBI working group proposed proactive monitoring and problem detection system – Log Analytics and Monitoring Application (LAMA).

What is LAMA?

LAMA is an API based performance data gathering and early warning system that is designed to help brokerage firms identify and address potential problems before they cause an outage. It collects data from the broker’s trading systems and uses machine learning to identify patterns that could indicate a problem. If LAMA detects a potential problem, it will generate an alert so that the brokerage firm and exchange can take preventive corrective action. It is a cost-effective way to prevent outages and reduce the risk of financial losses.

NSE India has adopted LAMA and LAMA reporting is a requirement for brokerage firms. There are heavy penalties for non-compliance with LAMA. Non-compliance is NOT an option.

LAMA Key Metrics
Application Hardware Database Network
Log Monitoring CPU Replication Status Bandwidth
Request/Second – throughput Memory Replication Queue Size Packet Error Count
Response Time Disk Replication Bandwidth
Trading API Failure Count Uptime Replication Latency
Client Authentication Failure Count
Historical Requests/Second
Historical Response Time

Reporting to Exchange

All the LAMA Key metrics details reporting is to be done at every 5 minutes for 24 hours on all trading days.

LAMA compliance challenges

Time-consuming:  Time consuming manual posting of data to LAMA is not even an option because of the frequency and the extent of data reporting requirement.

Inadequate monitoring data:  Most brokerage firms don’t have adequate monitoring on all the required systems to be able to report required data to NSE at required intervals.

How Applicare helps?

Applicare provides an out of the box implementation of LAMA that can be deployed in any brokerage firm’s environment in a matter of hours. With our current banking and brokerage customers, Applicare has been reporting data to NSE since NSE LAMA has gone live. We have worked closely with our customers, NSE LAMA team and our partner TA3S in developing and fine tuning Applicare LAMA implementation.

Applicare is scalable to meet the needs of any stock broker, regardless of their size. This means that it can be used by both large and small stock brokers.

The Applicare is an asset for any organization that wants to improve its IT operations. It helps you in identifying and troubleshooting problems, improve performance, and make better decisions about your IT infrastructure. It is built from ground up by administrators and developers who faced these challenges every day and wanted to automate the repetitive tasks.

Applicare provides full stack observability, self-detects problems and becomes foundation for self healing.

 

Applicare Agent

The Applicare agent is a key component of the Applicare monitoring solution. The agent is easy to install and use. It collects data from your virtual machines, systems and applications, and then sends it to the Applicare controller for processing and analysis.

Applicare Controller

The Applicare controller posts the data to LAMA API. All the posted data is saved for the historical purpose. Historical records can be used to identify patterns and trends that can help brokerage firms make better decisions. By analyzing them, brokerage firms can identify patterns that may indicate a problem with their trading system.

LAMA Key Metrics Dashboard

Application

 

 

 

 

Hardware

 

 

 

Database 

 

 

 

Network 

 

 

 

LAMA API Failure Notifications

If there was a failure while posing the key metrics to the LAMA API gateway, the Applicare notification service will notify the brokerage firms with its efficient logging mechanism. The notification service can be customized to meet the specific needs of the customers.

 

 

 

 

 

Conclusion

Brokerage firms are responsible for the financial losses of their clients. If an outage occurs, the firm may be liable for the losses incurred by their clients. Applicare can help protect the firm’s reputation by preventing outages and keeping their trading systems running smoothly. Applicare is known for its flexibility and ease of use, which allows it to be customized to meet the specific needs of each customer. Applicare makes the LAMA data posting process hassle-free and user-friendly for the brokerage firms.

Getting started with Applicare is easy. Simply register and get access to free on prem or in cloud Applicare.

 

 

How to monitor Microservices?

Microservices are being used every where and for good reasons. They do provide you with many benefits especially improved focus and cutting the time to market. Microservices do bring complexities too. Monitoring microservices is complex because of simply the number of them. Monitoring a user transaction requires monitoring many microservices. Correlating the data from them to identify the root cause manually is a nightmare especially in a complex environment with 100s or 1000s of microservices. This post is not about the pros and cons of microservices but is about how to monitor them easily using Applicare.

We are using an example of two Springboot java microservices – Users and Departments – a user belongs to a department. Every time we go and look up a user using Users microservice it makes a call to Departments microservice to get the department details. I would use Applicare service flow to demonstrate the architecture of our sample.

 

To  enable monitoring on each microservice all we need to do is to add Applicare agent arguments to the start of those microservices along with making Applicare agent binaries available at runtime. We will cover building Docker image of microservice with Applicare agent pre deployed  and running that image in Kubernetes environment in a future blog post. It is super easy.

Once these Users and Departments microservices are started with Applicare agent, they connect and start reporting data to Applicare controller. Once you login into an Applicare controller and download single agent, it includes information about the controller to report the data back. This controller can be on prem, in cloud  or our from SAAS offering.

You get details on infra performance

 

along with cumulative performance of each microservice and performance of each instance.


 

Applicare automatically ties the data together when Users microservice makes a call to Departments microservice for looking up the user’s department details.

 

No more struggling with monitoring of microservices and correlating the data. With Applicare you see complete user transaction details that may span across multiple microservices.

Getting started with Applicare is easy. Simply register to get access to free on prem or in cloud Applicare controller. Remember single agent is downloaded from the controller and deployed in your environment.

Have fun with microservices monitoring and instantly finding root cause 🙂

Synthetic Monitoring

Synthetic Monitoring is referred to as an approach of testing a web service or a website by simulating the website visitors’ requests across various geographies in order to test its availability and performance. One can compare performance stats of different geographies and formulate performance improvement plans. Synthetic monitoring lets you find problems before your customers do leading to shorter MTTR. One can be prepared for diverse user scenarios by testing the websites and applications from the end users perspective.

Advantages of Synthetic Monitoring:

With synthetic monitoring: Operations teams are able to find and fix issues before they impact the end users, monitor business processes and complex transactions, Measure and Adhere to SLAs, baselining and benchmarking, test from the end users’ perspective, prepare for a new market or peak traffic etc.

Two types of Synthetic Monitoring include Active (conducting the tests on schedule) & Passive monitoring (requires user action to initiate the test). There are chances of an issue going unnoticed with passive monitoring e.g. during less traffic hours. For this reason, active approach to synthetic monitoring is considered to be an efficient monitoring approach against outages and slowdowns.

SYNTHETIC MONITORING WITH APPLICARE

Applicare offers four types of synthetic monitoring:

    • HTTP Monitor
    • JMeter Script
    • Script Monitor
    • Screen Scraping Automation

With Synthetic User Experience Analyzer, you can view the performance stats for your configured monitors in real time, graphical and historical views. Double-clicking on an entry in any view or a data point in charts will bring up the BTM trace view or the detailed JMeter script result view if the monitor is a JMeter script.

User Experience

Jmeter Script Execution Details

HTTP Monitor Error Snapshot

Execution Details

Trace details

For further reading on Synthetic Monitoring with Applicare, go to: https://helpdesk.arcturustech.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/360043235972-Synthetic-Transactions

User Experience Monitoring

“I am going through few videos of [our competitor]…And I must congratulate UI/UX Team of Arcturus Technologies for doing fabulous Applicare dashboards.”

This feedback from a happy customer encouraged us to write & publish about Applicare’s User Experience Monitoring, which is going to be amazingly useful for anyone in the industry.

End User Experience Monitoring enables teams to monitor the impact of application and device performance from the end user’s point of view. End User Experience Analyzer is used to monitor performance of your web applications as experienced by actual end users. This is achieved by automatically injecting Javascript code to your JSP pages which reports back the total time it took to load the page from the time a user clicked the link, network time, server processing and browser rendering times, browser type, user location, and various other data. User Experience Analyzer displays historical data related to end-user performance broken down by different aspects in separate tabs as shown below:

The world map on the Overview tab shows the performance breakdown for each country. One can view top transactions by different criteria such as page count, average page load time etc. The chart shows the performance data over the selected time period / for a specific country selected on the world map.

Transactions Summary view displays performance statistics of transactions for the selected time period  / for the selected transaction, along with the timeline chart.

Data is displayed on the Realtime Transactions tab as soon as users start accessing the application being monitored. This view not only displays the performance stats of the last n number of individual recorded transactions, but also the location and browser information of the users accessing the application. One can reach to the root cause of a slow transaction by drilling down that transaction to find slow methods / SQL queries.

Slow Transactions are determined based on the ‘Saved Slow Transactions Percentage’ specified in UEM Slow Transactions configuration. The ‘Time Distribution’ picture of any transaction helps in identifying where the slowness is, in a matter of a minute.

Browsers tab displays performance data for each client browser processing the transactions.

Servers tab displays performance data of the backend servers processing the transactions.

OS tab shows the OS used by the users of the application being monitored.

Analytics tab provides analysis of the application usage, e.g. Total visits, average page view duration, unique visitors, bounce rate etc.

Interested in trying out Applicare’s UEM? Register here now and get access to the trial version.

Health Check With “Applicare”

‘An ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure.’

Because Ben Franklin knew a lot about not letting small problems become big headaches, he would have loved Applicare!

Discovering trouble after it happens is too late. The only way to survive in business is to stay ahead of what tomorrow may bring. Arcturus Technologies’ health check service can keep your application environment tuned-up and running smoothly.

Applicare™ is the market’s easiest-to-use next-generation Application Performance Management (APM) and Business Transactions Management (BTM) solution. Its embedded AI monitoring capabilities can improve your app’s health, user satisfaction, and business transactions. Applicare lets you know if something is wrong in real-time. Its innovative alert system enables enterprises to fix problems quickly before they have a chance to become major challenges. Arcturus Technologies is proud to provide application performance monitoring with advanced analytics and data integration platform — the Applicare Platform — that lets organizations to take maximum advantage of their business-critical data.

There is no better way to discover and remediate where enterprise level applications are missing the mark. Applicare delivers instantly! By uniquely combining consulting expertise and Applicare capabilities, we offer a comprehensive health check to review your applications’ environment, configuration, and performance. Register here to schedule an ROI rich “Health Check Engagement”.