When running a FIX implementation it's generally viewed as being a wise thing to have a support infrastructure in place. There are many ways to do this but the main way is to use one or more vendor tools as a dashboard to see what is going on within your FIX infrastructure.[Disclosure: For most of the firms below I know the CEO, CTO and the guys at the coalface doing the work. As such, this post will respect the policy of no "naming and shaming" for this blog. Comments will be moderated if they fail to respect that policy.]
CameronTec now owns three toolsets - legacy Cameron (Catalys), legacy Greenline (MagniFIX) and legacy LaSalleTech (FIXDetective)
FIXFlyer has Daytona
Cynapps FIXCompare
Generally most firms will use the monitoring toolkit that came with the FIX engine. A big challenge is for the case where a FIX engine was built in-house and so any tooling is rudimentary at best. In some cases I have simply seen a whole lot of screens running tail and a number of grep/awk/sed scripts. Inelegant and has a very poor signal to noise ratio - it's hard to see problems when looking at screen that look like this.
The topic of cost saving in production support has been covered here before and so to echo that post, when looking for a production support toolset, look for something that does not place itself onto the production FIX server(s) and use CPU and memory. Packet capture tools are the right way to do this if throughput and latency are important.
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