TMX Group Taps NetScout Systems for Latency Monitoring

Toronto-based TMX Group, operator of cash and derivatives markets for multiple asset classes including equities, fixed income and energy, is deploying nGenius Network Assurance Solution from NetScout Systems for latency monitoring. The solution will provide real-time performance management of highly critical transactions, application and networks.

TMX Group operates the Toronto Stock Exchange, Montreal Exchange, Boston Options Exchange, TSX Venture Exchange and Natural Gas Exchange, as well as Shorcan, Equicom and other TMX companies providing trading markets, clearing facilities, data products and other services to the global financial community. It chose NetScout because of its unified approach to service assurance for providing real-time packet-flow performance, management, latency analysis, historical reporting, and support for Cisco NetFlow from a single integrated solutions.

TMX is leveraging the nGenius solution for comprehensive, end-to-end real-time and historical assurance services, including the ability to predict emerging performance issues. TMX Group has also selected Sniffer Financial Intelligence, a specialized module for high-performance capital markets environments. Unified with the nGenius solution, Sniffer leverages the same packet-flow data to provide views of order messages and market data feeds to understand latency and performance associated with trade-order execution and network performance.

"In our business, we invest in leading edge networking technologies to achieve the highest levels of performance and reliability possible," commented Brenda Hoffman, senior vice president and CIO for TMX Group. "Understanding real-time performance and latency dynamics with micro-second granularity has become an absolute necessity. The nGenius Service Assurance Solution from NetScout provided us with a comprehensive and highly scalable approach that can address the volumes in our ultra high performance environment."

TMX Group is also using the nGenius solution to monitor proprietary communications protocols as well as Financial Information Exchange (FIX) transactions over its Cisco-based network. The solution provides visibility into highly complex trade execution flows and streaming market data to identify performance degradation, including latency and dropped packets that could impact the timing of a financial trade. Besides supporting the real-time capabilities,TMX also required a solution that supported historical analysis and reporting of detailed forensics of performance incidents and provide performance reporting to clients

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