Challenge
In the financial services sector, minutes are worth millions. With an immense number of transactions per second, the Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE) needed to ensure every trade went through. Nano-level system hiccups cause problems for the investors upon which CBOE depends, so gaining that level of granular visibility was crucial.

The financial services space is subject to privacy and compliance regulations due to the sensitive nature of data flowing across their networks. This, combined with the unique challenges of multicast traffic, which distributes "live" feeds to many users, meant CBOE needed an analysis solution powerful enough to meet these special needs.

Solution
CBOE purchased several GigaStors and a number of Observer® Expert Consoles. The Network Instruments products provided decodes for the Financial Information eXchange (FIX) protocol, used by financial service, brokerage, and banking firms for transactions involved in buying and selling within financial markets.

GigaStor™ is a retrospective network analysis solution that allows administrators to capture up to 48 TB of network data and play it back for analysis. GigaStor handles Gigabit and 10 Gb networks.

Network Manager John Rittner felt GigaStor would provide CBOE the line-rate packet capture it required, plus features not found in competing solutions. Of particular value were time-interval analysis and Connection Dynamics, which allows for graphically viewing system conversations and pinpointing delays.

"We find we often don’t hear about problems until hours after they’ve happened," Rittner said. "By deploying the GigaStor at strategic places on the network we have the ability to go back in time, filter down to the particular traffic of interest and then do our analysis.

This saves us a lot of time that would've been spent recreating the issue or waiting for it to happen again."

Consulting the Expert
By employing Observer Expert -- a solution featuring VoIP and wireless experts, application analysis, and stream reconstruction -- Rittner isolated issues like transaction delay and addressed application response time concerns.

"Some of the Observer Expert tools we find useful are Connection Dynamics and time interval analysis," Rittner said. "Expert allows us to quickly narrow down the problem, or even determine if there was a network problem at all."

Observer Expert also allowed CBOE to automate processes previously done by hand, which were tedious and time consuming.

"Oftentimes we would have to export the data we’d captured with our old solution into an Excel spreadsheet and massage it to get the kind of data we now get from time interval analysis," Rittner said. "It was a very labor-intensive, manual process. The ability to filter down on specific traffic flows and do time interval analysis has been very valuable."

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