Antony Fung

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Peace of mind perhaps summarises the key benefit of mosaicOA to a client.

World Class Services

CJC is a market data technology consulting and services firm with over twenty years’ experience designing, building and operating market data systems. Operating these mission critical systems for a global client base through world class, 24x7x365 managed services, has only increased and honed our expertise in designing and building them. We understand data distribution technology and we have developed innovative accelerator technologies that enable us to deliver that expertise more rapidly, cost effectively and efficiently.

mosaicOA – a window on System Performance & Capacity

One of those accelerator technologies is mosaicOA, an IT operations analytics tool that effectively provides us – and our clients – with a window on their data technology estate. The product ingests all relevant metrics and events from a client’s IT monitoring platform into an InfluxDB time-series database which, via a flexible front-end, can be interrogated to deliver and visualize key statistics on client systems’ performance and capacity. It is not simply a comprehensive reporting tool, important though this is; mosiacOA also has vital predictive capabilities – particularly around resource capacity.

This tool is firmly embedded in the managed service operations support model we have for capital markets clients, but it has demonstrated its versatility by also becoming an integral component of a managed service we operate for a global consumer products firm. This client wished to engage a fully managed service to operate their data estate, using our experience and tooling to provide them with incident, problem and capacity management, as well as relevant reporting. Client data comprises standard payloads, including that related to order management and customer feedback, as well as around manufacturing process. The data technology estate currently includes a mix of twenty on-prem and cloud-based server.

mosaicOA’s greatest value for the client is in the provision of problem management and capacity analysis. All the necessary data is available to CJC’s support team and it can be visualized instantly to report statistics to the client on the previous month, as well as required projections for the whole environment. The examples below present a flavour of what is delivered.

Problem Management The client infrastructure infrastructure monitoring platform currently generates over 14.2 million metrics and over 100 critical and warning events every day. This information is stored to mosaicOA and is available for immediate analysis. Our support team have built a suite of dashboards which continually update and highlight any issue occurrences.

By looking at the IT metrics right now, it’s impossible to understand trends occurring over time. mosaicOA provides a customisable view of recent and long-term history, our support team can see if servers are continually using more resources. These trigger pro-active investigation of the platform, be it production or development.

CJC/Client Platform Performance Dashboard – showing 60 days system behaviour

CJC/Client Event Analytics Dashboard – showing all incidents detected over 60 days

By logging the critical/warning events when thresholds/errors occur - issues can be quickly viewed and understood. Incidents can be triggered from affiliated infrastructure such as feeds, caches and entitlements. Being able to view the events holistically across the infrastructure means our support team can see the chain of events spanning servers, events and IT metrics across a correlated time period.

Capacity Management Built into mosaicOA is a ‘hot and cold’ analysis feature, which places CPU, Memory and Networking on a level playing field.  CPU is measured as 0-100% spectrum, unlike memory, networking and other application statistics (network packet rates can go into billions).  mosaicOA places everything on the same scale of -100 to 100 and applies a Performance Index.  This provides a temperature of the server which shows how it’s rated against its other servers. It is always clear to see which server is under or over utilised.

Hot and Cold System Analysis

This machine led analysis provides our support team with a constant understanding of capacity and early warning around potential upcoming client issues.

mosaicOA also enables support teams to use months / years of data to aid estate understanding and future planning. CJC continually trendline against the client’s ‘always on’ infrastructure – so all capacity related elements are visualized:

60 Days of History & 30 Days of Trendline from CPU

Summary

mosaicOA is a key innovative component in CJC’s operational support model for this client, enabling us to deliver a more rapid, cost effective and efficient service than by relying on traditional monitoring processes – commonly, support teams need to write queries to databases manually, or export the specific data they are looking for into a flat csv file, which is then imported into a 3rd party software (such as MS Excel). We estimate a time saving for reporting alone of around 40-60%, giving us more time to fine-tune dashboards and deep dive into issues diagnosis that may otherwise have re-occurred

Paul Massoni, Market Data Technical Consultant at CJC, has commented; “The dashboard reports we deliver allow me to give our client peace of mind that we’re not just reactively watching screens. The reality is we’re gathering analytical data to find recurring events based on past behaviour, securing a thorough understanding of their environment and the impact of various events. We’re establishing visibility into their infrastructure that exists nowhere else.”

Steve Moreton, Global Head of Product Management at CJC, added; “From a client perspective, peace of mind perhaps summarises the key benefit of mosaicOA. The tool effectively provides an insurance policy against unexpected infrastructure issues – including those around capacity management – enabling rapid identification and rectification before they cause expensive, and potentially reputational, damage. Cost savings, though difficult to quantify, are potentially significant.“

Carl Kemp