Startup Market Data Tools is rolling out DeltaT, a latency measurement tool with a focus on the needs of developers writing interfaces to market data feeds.
Founded by former Thomson Reuters software development specialists, Market Data Tools is aiming DeltaT at a more focused marketplace than that being addressed by latency monitoring heavyweights Corvil and TS-Associates.
DeltaT is being directed to measure latency of market data feeds, and the software stacks/application programming interfaces associated with them. To date, the company has unsurprisingly focused on feeds from Thomson Reuters, but it is now looking at others, from the likes of Bloomberg, Spryware and Exegy.
DeltaT works with packet capture cards, from Endace and Napatech (and in the future from Myricom) and can also subscribe to data feed handler APIs, in both cases time stamping data packets for comparison across two points.
Typical applications include comparing the timeliness of data across two feeds (e.g. direct vs consolidated), the latency of data as it passes through network infrastructure (e.g. from firewall to server), or the latency of software handlers delivering the data to applications.
A graphical representation of latency is available – and can be fed from either a live feed, or from a historical capture file – to easily determine latency spikes and other issues.
As well as being leveraged by application developers interested in obtaining the fastest data, DeltaT can also be used to monitor SLAs for data feeds and by data feed vendors to demonstrate the speed of their offerings. Future enhancements will include a number of alerting mechanisms to signal when SLAs are breached.
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