XMon Static Data – Choosing your integration mode

XMon Static Data provides real-time analytics, transparency and control of static data flows. Using XMon, our customers have made significant savings and established unprecendented levels of transparency and accountability over data usage.

Within a firm, XMon can integrate at three levels:

  1. Data entering the firm: through third party data providers, such as Bloomberg, Reuters and others
  2. Data flowing within the firm: internal application calls and internal data flows
  3. Data exiting the firm: in the form of customer reports or other analytics

Although customer requirements vary greatly for points 2 and 3, point 1 above is generally a standard interface to the leading data vendors: Bloomberg (through their Data License offering) and Reuters (over DatascopeSelect).  In this post, we’ll describe the options customers have when monitoring data entering the firm.

Should we be Active?

In order for XMon to analyse requests, data request files must be sent in for analysis. For this purpose XMon provides two integration modes: Active and Passive, otherwise known as Proxy and non-Proxy connectivity.

Active monitoring, or ‘proxy’ mode

In this mode, XMon acts as a reference data proxy; in other words, requests are forwarded to XMon for processing and then XMon forwards requests to data vendors provided they have not breached any user defined rule. This is – by far – the simplest connection mode. As systems connect to data providers, using the active monitoring mode is merely a re-direction of calls to XMon (generally a minor configuration change in the system is required) and generally applications are good to go: all requests sent through XMon will appear automatically in the dashboard and a new era of transparency will begin. It is however not always feasible (or desireable) to connect data consumers in active monitoring mode. Certain institutions have prohibitive policies which make the active monitoring mode impractical in some cases. For these cases, the passive monitoring mode can be used. We’ll describe the passive monitoring mode in the section below, but first a quick summary of pros/cons of the active monitoring mode:

Psst… Want to know XMon’s availability statistics? We provide public uptime metrics!

Passive monitoring, or ‘non-proxy’ mode

In this mode, XMon receives a copy of data requests and does not forward these to the vendors. In passive monitoring mode, XMon merely gets a file copy or ‘parallel’ call and records it for analytics, reporting and governance.This mode requires that customers have, or keep a copy of all data requests.

So, which mode should you choose?

96% of all requests sent to XMon are sent using Active monitoring. (Click here for more stats!).

This being said, both modes can be used on the same set up! A general approach is to have all development / test / UAT / Staging etc. environments connect through the active monitoring mode and production systems connect through Passive monitoring mode. This provides the advantages of control and live alerting on consumers that may run astray and flexibility and transparency on production consumers.

Want to know more?

Do reach out! And let’s get your data usage under control.