In Beeks Analytics, data capture and decoding occurs in the VMX-Capture layer, which passes the data to VMX-Analysis for further analytics. Most of the endpoints in the Beeks REST API are dedicated to querying this data in VMX-Analysis.

VMX-Prism is a Beeks Analytics packet capture system that runs on your appliance to support advanced querying, analysis, and decoding of packet captures.

Beeks provides a separate API that queries endpoints for VMX-Prism.

Key Benefits of VMX-Prism API

VMX-Prism allows us to query the packet captures in VMX-Capture in addition to being able to query post-processed data in VMX-Analysis. This delivers the following benefits:

  • Get the raw truth
    The packet captures are the ‘raw truth’ of what happened on the network at any particular point in time. Being able to retrieve them dynamically can help in all sorts of situations:

    • Dynamic retrieval when a problem is detected.

    • Regular archiving jobs of particular connections or particular times of day.

    • Avoids manual retrieval of packet captures when, for example, a team that doesn’t have production access needs regular packet captures retrieved for them.

  • Query superpowers
    The VMX-Prism API goes beyond simply retrieving packet capture files: it also exposes access to the dynamic decoding that the VMX-Capture stack provides.
    So, for example, you can:

    • Pull out FIX message logs.

    • Pull out a stream of price updates that occurred during a particular time.
      Being able to do this retrospectively directly from the packet captures allows you to perform this analysis for much higher volume data than you would be able to store continually for a long period of time.

This rich functionality enables you to put your trading and pricing operations performance under a microscope when you most need it.

VMX-Prism and Distributed Capture

VMX-Prism is designed to support a distributed network of capture probes, and offers a unified way of navigating the capture repository and querying all captured data. VMX-Explorer includes a standard dashboard that visualises VMX-Prism data.

Use VMX-Prism to:

  1.  Get individual packet capture information from a specific Prism instance on a specific appliance via the Prism REST API.

  2. Get amalgamated packet capture information from multiple Prism instances on different appliances via the Prism REST API.