"Latency is our number one SLA " - a JPA client
Just getting your data out of the door isn't enough any more. You need to be sure that it's getting to your customers as quickly as possible and that it's of good quality. That's why we've started to put together a range of tools to help you monitor both data latency and data quality. You can read about them in more details in this white paper, but here's a brief description.
Tracker
The Tracker suite is a set of tools for monitoring data latency. You can use Tracker to watch a set of data items on their journey throughout your system and out to the vendors. It does this by using the extensive range of PlatformOne™ gateways and feed handlers as agents to provide it with updates from the items at each stage in the journey. It then compares the values to build up a picture of the progress of each data item.
Note that the various modules that make up the PlatformOne™ contribution suite have tracking capability built into them as well, so that Tracker can - for example - get an update at the exact point at which data is sent off to Marketlink. However, you don't need to use our contribution suite to use Tracker.
The resulting information can be logged, or monitored for exceptions, or made available as a feed to other applications, such as TrackMon, the remote monitoring tool for Tracker. Because Tracker is built on top of PlatformOne™, you can even use standard PlatformOne™ APIs to watch the tracking information within your own applications. Some of our customers are even using this information to make decisions, such as whether or not to pull out of the market if the latency goes over a particular theshold.
DataQA
The Data Quality Analyser is concerned with monitoring the intrinsic quality of a stream of data. You can use it to apply a series of checks, to answer such questions as: has the spread gone out of kilter? Has the data stopped updating? How fast are the updates? And so on (we're adding new checks all the time).
DataQA provides you with the complete tool to keep tabs on what your contribution systems are actually sending out. Of course, we feel that we should point out here that if you use a tool like PlatformOne™ Sub2Pub to manage your contributions, issues like backwardation needn't arise in the first place.