Most recently, Israeli startup firm Correlix has come out with Latency Intelligence, software that sits on network switch mirror ports and monitors the traffic going by, combined with correlation algorithms that, the company says, can pinpoint latency to the box level.

Reuters last month launched Reuters Latency Monitor for its Reuters Market Data System – its technology is based on Endace’s network monitoring hardware and Trading Metrics software, which connects to enterprise switch or router ports and continuously compares timestamps in the messages with timestamps generated by passive Endace probes.

Also in March, CodeStreet added latency monitoring and auditing tools to its Market Data Works market data development and operations tools.

And in the same month, Trading Systems Associates announced TipOff Latency Feed, based on its middleware analysis appliance. This service examines the time lag between an exchange’s private, internal acknowledgment of an order fill and the point at which it has a public impact on the order book – the “under the radar” tiime. This tells financial institutions how long their trade remains private and how long before other institutions can see information about that trade

Other existing solutions typically fall under the category of “business service management” or “transaction management” and come from the IT management world.

Wachovia recently told us that it’s using OpTier’s CoreFirst software to monitor and improve the response time of its foreign exchange platform. OpTier’s “active context tracking” is embedded in applications and/or middleware and identifies the end-to-end flow of every transaction. In the future OpTier plans to partner with Cisco to offer a network-based solution.

HP's Business Technology Optimization software (created by a software company called Mercury Interactive that HP acquired) performs a similar function, but does it by creating synthetic transactions and recording their performance versus stated objectives.

What type of data latency monitor is best? I would think the network-based offerings would be the least obtrusive, but the embedded software monitors would be better able to track individual trades from start to finish.