As we noted in April and as Ivy Schmerken noted in her story in the SIFMA daily newspapers we put out, there's a promising market forming around data latency monitoring tools for Wall Street firms, tools that measure and track precisely how long it's taking market data to travel from exchange to algorithmic trading application and alert managers when latency problems occur. Such tools can help a firm make sure that its trading programs can react instantly to market changes. There were two more data latency monitoring announcements at the SIFMA show that we didn't have time to include in our earlier coverage this week.First of all, Credit Suisse went public with its use of CorvilNet's latency management system, which helps the firm monitor, analyze and improve network infrastructure for low-latency trading. The Credit Suisse deployment covers LAN and WAN networks on three continents. The software lets network administrators specify latency objectives and monitor the network for compliance against those baselines. If latency violations occur, CorvilNet alerts the administrator and provides recommendations for network optimizations to re-establish performance in line with expectations. CorvilNet also lets network administrators measure the headroom available for market surges, traffic growth, or additional applications on the network.

And secondly, CodeStreet, a provider of Visual Studio-like market data application development tools called Market Data Works, announced that it added a capacity planning and latency benchmarking component to its software toolkit. The new feature monitors how quickly market data from Reuters Market Data System (RMDS) is reaching trading programs, alerting administrators when high latency occurs. Where many of the competing latency monitoring solutions install hardware or software on routers to try to monitor every data packet, CodeStreet's version is simply built into new applications created using Market Data Works. To test a new application's ability to handle market spikes, the tool simulates a high update rate feed handler by replaying recorded market data at rates of hundreds of thousands of updates per second. Once applications are deployed, it monitors latency on an ongoing basis, provides alerts when slowdowns occur and provides reports that track performance in case of trader or customer complaints.