ITRS Group launched ITRS Insights, a new IT Operation Analytics (ITOA) application, built on its new Valo technology.

Both the application and technology address the challenge of running real-time analysis and search functions on time-series, semi-structured and even unstructured data simultaneously. Valo is an industry independent technology, and ITRS Insights brings these abilities to the growing ITOA space to help businesses extract maximum value from their increasingly plentiful and important operational data.

In data-intensive industries like financial services, unlocking this data can be crucial. Businesses can benefit from previously unavailable insights hidden in their data. These can add value and keep them ahead of the competition, or help them comply with ever-changing regulatory requirements. Insights is capable of delivering this analysis in real-time, across terabytes of data, without the need for batch processing, and can work in tandem with, or independently of, ITRS' existing application monitoring technology, Geneos.

ITRS CTO Justo Ruiz Ferrer explained: “Over the past three years we’ve built Valo from the ground up to crunch through big data, and Insights brings that power to ITOA. You’re now able to cross-analyse semi-structured, unstructured and time-series data in real-time. For example, an investment bank might want to look at their trade latency from data in log files, and system and application metrics to see why latency is unexpectedly high, and whether it’s usual compared to previous historic levels of business activity – that requires a combination of real-time analytics on semi-structured data, and machine learning and anomaly detection on structured historical data respectively. This is now possible with Valo and ITRS Insights.”

Insights is the first application built on ITRS’ new technology, Valo: a software platform with a Software Developer Kit (SDK) that provides the ability to store and perform real-time and historical analytics on masses of data. Valo is industry independent, and ITRS hopes to work both in-house and with partners to build a variety of applications for big-data, real-time analytic intensive use-cases, both in its core financial services space and beyond.

“Valo really is one-of-a-kind combination of the leading concepts in big data and analytics – but we don’t expect it to stay that way,” said Guy Warren, CEO, ITRS. “At the moment, it’s very difficult to handle both time-series and semi-structured data storage so that it can be queried and analysed in real-time. Those trying to do so are usually patching together some combination of standard tools such as Spark and ELK. Having all of that in one powerful, streamlined platform is too valuable to businesses for others not to follow Valo’s lead. The challenge for us is to keep investing in the product so that Valo stays ahead of the game.”