This section explains core concepts that appear throughout the BAM dashboards.

For a more in-depth explanation of these concepts, see the Beeks Analytics Data Guide.

Visibility Points and Probes

A Visibility Point is a location in an application or network from which we want to capture data.

Visibility Points are typically placed where network flows of interest can be observed — such as connections to exchanges or between internal services. Each Visibility Point has one or more probes that perform tasks like packet capture, protocol decoding, and statistics generation.

There are two types of probe used in Beeks Analytics for Markets:

  • A capture probe is responsible just for capturing packets and writing them to disk in raw PCAP format

  • A stack probe can perform more complex decoding and analysis functionality.

For more information about capture probes and stack probes, see the Configuration Guide for VMX-Capture.

External Groups, feeds, IP addresses and Gateways

An External Group represents an endpoint or group of endpoints outside your infrastructure. This could be a trading venue, a client, or another counterparty that you are exchanging data with. External Groups are defined by a set of IP addresses or switch ports associated with the external entity. BAM aggregates metrics such as latency, message rates, and packet rates by External Group to help you identify how different counterparties or venues are performing.

For example, you can use BAM to compare wiretime latency between different External Groups to evaluate which exchange feed is performing better.

An external group can have a number of different endpoints that are monitored within it:

  • A feed is a market data feed published by that External Group that we want to analyse market data metrics for.

  • Unicast or Multicast IPs can be monitored (if, for example, multicast data is published but it isn’t appropriate to decode it as market data e.g. message bus traffic).

  • A TCP Gateway is a service within the External Group that we want to analyse TCP metrics for.

  • A Trading Gateway is a service within the External Group that we want to analyse Trading metrics for.

Internal Group

An Internal Group represents a group of internal endpoints — typically within your own infrastructure — that are sending or receiving trading messages. Internal Groups are also defined by IP address or switch port, and often correspond to specific applications, services, or serversBKDA002 Analytics Data ….

Internal Groups can be further subdivided into Internal Entities, which represent more granular components (e.g., individual applications or container instances) and enable more detailed performance analytics.

When BAM is used to monitor a Proximity Cloud or Exchange Cloud deployment, each Dedicated Server is its own Internal Group - the terms are interchangeable.