CMC Markets: Utilising Geneos to provide global visibility across their IT estate

CMC Markets use of Geneos

CMC Markets is a UK-based financial derivatives dealer. The company offers online trading in spread betting, contracts for difference (CFDs) and foreign exchange (forex) across world markets. CMC is headquartered in London, with hubs in Sydney and Singapore and a further 11 offices internationally. The company’s online platform, Next Generation, allows users to trade over 10,000 financial derivatives, including equities, foreign exchange, commodities and more. Today, Next Generation services 60,000 plus global customers who place in the region of 63 million trades a year.

The challenge

Central to CMC’s business is the knowledge that the IT estate is performing and that trades are processing. The business is exclusively online and, in a space where speed is critical to clients, delayed response times are unacceptable and potential downtime is detrimental to the company’s reputation.

Their application support function is tasked with monitoring and managing this estate. To do so, they used a range of siloed monitoring technologies and platforms. Gareth Lawrence, Head of IT Production Support approached ITRS to utilise Geneos’ advanced functionality to provide a 360 degree view of their production estate. ITRS Geneos has been used to integrate with the underlying solutions and applications to provide the support team with a single pane of glass, with Geneos acting as the monitor of monitors feeding events from multiple sources.

The results

Geneos has eradicated the need for information silos. It consolidates data from multiple tools into one dashboard to provide enhanced real-time monitoring across their global IT estate. In the event of an alert, support can now proactively identify issues and resolve them, with reduced Mean Time to Recovery and therefore increasing operational control.

Dashboard objects dynamically change colour when certain user-defined conditions are met, prompting remedial action. What’s more, these objects are ordered to depict relationships, allowing for better business process monitoring and faster root cause analysis. Previously, this was difficult and time consuming as there was no complete view of the components in the technology stack. Root cause analysis is enabled by Geneos’ flexible architecture, which facilitates non-invasive integration with other solutions, and drill down capabilities.

Gareth Lawrence from CMC was pleased with the impact Geneos has had on his business: “Geneos has provided greater visibility of our system and improved our responsiveness by consolidating our monitoring into a single, real time, dynamic view. The net effects of this are proactive
performance management and an improved workflow which ultimately results in a better experience for our end-users.”

Paul Stanley the 3rd Tier Application Support Team Lead whose team is responsible for the day to day management of the dashboard stated: “The implementation was straight forward and the ease of maintaining and amending the dashboard has meant that as new services are integrated it is easy for us to add new checks and visual representation to the dashboard.”

John Barnes, Account Manager at ITRS, added that “in a highly-competitive industry, CMC’s brand is a crucial differentiator. Geneos will enable the business to improve reliability and ensure they maintain their strong reputation in the market place.”

Geneos for online retail trading

COLLECT

Geneos’ light footprint monitoring agents collect data from across CMC’s existing monitoring tools to compile data from applications, databases, servers, middleware and other components used throughout their 14 offices.

DETECT

Data is passed to the consolidation and analytics layer. Here, CMC have implemented key performance indicators and apply their business logic through a highly configurable rule and alert engine. Examples of these KPIs
include:

Trade volume vs. historical
Number of client logins and charting requests
Message queue counts

ACT

KPIs are mapped as objects onto a large dashboard which in turn, equips CMC’s application support team with a unified view of their global production IT estate. This enables them to identify whether the system is
available and performing as it should (now vs. historical). If it is not, real-time alerts prompt CMC to drill down to the details provided by the underlying solutions, and take appropriate action.