Beeks Analytics (formerly Velocimetrics) the global provider of real-time, comprehensive, business performance monitoring and analysis solutions, today announces the release of Beeks Analytics 6.0 (full details below).
This latest version significantly strengthens Beeks Analytics’ ability to deliver uncompromised operational oversight across complete end-to-end processes in fast, acutely complex and high volume trading environments. It also launches the availability of augmented on-demand and scheduled business reporting capabilities, along with additional enhancements to further improve the user experience for both business and technical groups.
As the speed, capacity and complexity of how firms trade continues to increase there is growing regulatory pressure to minimise the potential risks that can flow from using trading technologies. Managing these risks has also become a top priority for firms as the inability to control, for example, how an algorithmic trading system behaves in extremely volatile markets can quickly create considerable trading losses. Meeting these requirements, along with the need to continuously improve trading performance, demands a high degree of operational oversight and post-trade analysis across intricate trading environments.
With Beeks Analytics 6, industry participants will continue to benefit from a detailed, real-time, understanding of all activities taking place across every system and network as market data and trading volumes continue to expand in exceedingly complicated trading situations. In doing so, issues can be immediately detected, their root cause instantly determined and the impact on clients, orders and trades quickly quantified and reported on.
Beeks Analytics has achieved this scalable solution by sending data captured at the infrastructure level to a cluster of interactive analysis servers. This innovative approach divides up complex correlation and tracking workloads, allowing near-linear scaling to cope with increasing volume, whilst retaining the capability to provide a unified view across the trading operation.
Persistence to disk performance has also been improved by an order of magnitude. Beeks Analytics 6 can record and retain the full trade history and details of relationships; for example, even when the order is complex and has been executed over an extended period as multiple, related, algorithmic or exchange trades. In doing so, facilitating complete electronic order or trade reconstruction, creating a fully transparent audit trail that offers valuable opportunities for post-trade performance analysis.
Furthermore through extended reporting capabilities, users can now create easily configurable management reports detailing current trading performance as required. Delivering the data necessary for meaningful day-to-day issue-tracking and infrastructure spend decision-making, Beeks Analytics’ on-demand reporting functionality enables intra-day improvements to be made.
These enhancements offer significant benefit, enabling users to for example:
- Track up to 500 million trades per trading day in real-time
- Alert users to dropped or missing trades they may otherwise believe are being processed, detecting possible sources of operational risk
- Search and promptly reconstruct any order executed as a series of individual related market events and orders over the period of a day. Providing detailed performance analytics at every stage, users can quickly determine if infrastructure or application problems may be causing delays
- Instantly identify outliers and chart latency distributions across all prices, quotes and trades and investigate each in detail, regardless of current volumes
- Create customised queries that can then be executed in one-click by non-expert users through a simple to use interface
- Produce business-level management reports as required detailing for instance the worst performing trades over the day and automatically email these PDF reports to a pre-agreed list of recipients.
Commenting on the new release a representative of Beeks Analytics stated:
‘We have developed and tested this latest version working closely with our existing clients. Our users rely on Beeks Analytics for operational integrity and are looking to expand its use in their business to support very high volume processes. This major new release is a milestone in scalability and high-volume persistence, meeting this growing requirement, whilst making it even easier for users to navigate the system and gain the detailed analytics required by different business areas for effective operational decision-making.’
What is Beeks Analytics 6.0
In April 2015, Beeks Analytics 6.0 was released. This enhanced version features improvements included in response to client requests for expanded functionality to meet new business requirements, to further improve the user experience and address emerging market needs.
Please find below a summary of the major enhancements included within this release:
Enabling complex and high volume environments to be accurately analysed
Beeks Analytics has always excelled in enabling complex environments, trading strategies or business flows to be monitored with uncompromised visibility, facilitating real-time alerting and instant access to detailed performance analytics.
However, historically there has been a natural limit to the volume of events that could be effectively monitored and analysed at the same time. These limitations are due to the restrictions of CPU, memory and the levels of persistence that can be achieved using a single machine.
With Beeks Analytics 5.0 a clustered architecture was introduced, enabling Beeks Analytics to scale over multiple servers and process significantly larger volumes of events in real-time than had previously been possible. The following diagram shows how the clustering approach works
This approach proved very effective, however it did involve setting up rules at the agent level as all events that needed to be correlated together required being sent to the same partition. Additionally, in 5.0, whilst the clustering approach offered significant alerting and analysis capabilities, opportunities were identified to improve individual item alerting and the analysis of distributions across all captured data.
With Beeks Analytics 6.0 the methodology has been substantially refined. The partitions are now in constant communication with each other, removing the need to set up user-defined routing rules. Clustering is more or less transparent in Beeks Analytics 6.0, enabling the highly scalable solution to be deployed with minimal effort. Additionally, all analysis limitations have been eradicated. Now all variations of analytical analysis and alerting possible with standard Velocimetrics is available in the clustered edition.
Significantly improved persistence
With Beeks Analytics 6.0 persistence has been improved by an order of magnitude. This improvement is independent of whether Beeks Analytics is running as a standalone server, or operating as a partition within a clustered deployment.
As every partition writes to an independent database instance, persistence can be scaled linearly by adding partitions to the cluster.
Enriched on-demand and scheduled reporting capabilities
Beeks Analytics 6.0 offers significant management reporting capabilities. This functionality enables users to:
- Define the report’s selection criteria
- Determine what they would like the report to look like
- Produce PDF, CSV or XML versions of their chosen report
- Pre-load the email addresses of the reports’ recipients, so once created the report can be automatically emailed to the intended recipients
Reports from Beeks Analytics can be created intra-day as required or scheduled to run and then sent to the selected email list at pre-set times or if the user wishes submitted for processing by an alternative system. This approach provides users with maximum flexibility.
One-click query execution
Velocimetrics 6 enables users to set-up and save a query with pre-defined query and output format selections. Other users can, subject to having the correct view permissions, simply click on the query definition to run it,
This functionality enables users who may not be overly familiar with the solution to execute pre-defined queries in a single click. In doing so, they can still benefit from the enhanced insight into complex situations that advanced queries can offer, without needing to be an expert system user.
Improved manageability of large volumes of aggregated data for analysis
Whilst Beeks Analytics’ aggregators have always effectively handled large data volumes, users were finding that locating figures in deep or broad aggregations could prove time-consuming. To assist users with this functionality, two new aggregation features have been added.
Firstly, users can now access a filter bar to speedily centre the aggregator in their area of interest. So by simply submitting a filter string, possibly with wildcards, the aggregator view will remove all nodes failing to match the filter.
Secondly, you can set up an aggregator so it only retrieves the “top” rows. For example, if the user had an aggregator which was rolling up computed TCP statistics across a very large number of TCP-level conversations, and they were interested in the worst 10 performing conversations related to a certain statistic, Beeks Analytics 6 will now effortlessly configure the aggregator to deliver data, ten rows at a time, sorted by the selected statistic.
Through these combined improvements Beeks Analytics is able to support an even wider array of business situations, and the business and technical teams Beeks Analytics assists benefit from an enhanced user experience.
