Interfaces
This document defines the inputs, outputs, and interface boundaries of the Monitoring Stack — what it consumes, what it exposes, how it connects to running system parts, and where its interface responsibilities begin and end.
Inputs
The Monitoring Stack consumes observability-relevant signals from running system parts. All inputs originate from active runtime behavior — the Monitoring Stack does not consume persisted analytical outputs or historical result datasets.
Telemetry
Metrics, counters, gauges, histograms, and other structured telemetry emitted by running system components. Telemetry provides the quantitative basis for understanding runtime behavior, resource utilization, throughput, latency, and operational performance.
Status signals
Discrete indicators of component state — running, degraded, stopped, errored, initializing, or similar runtime-status representations emitted by running system parts. Status signals make the operational state of individual components visible.
Health signals
Structured indications of component or subsystem health — liveness checks, readiness checks, and health-check responses that allow the Monitoring Stack to assess whether running parts are functioning within expected parameters.
Error and failure signals
Errors, exceptions, failure events, and abnormal-condition indicators emitted during runtime execution. These signals support detection of runtime issues, degradations, and conditions that may require operational attention.
Observability-relevant runtime outputs
Other runtime-produced signals that carry observability value — log-structured outputs, trace spans, execution-progress indicators, and resource-consumption reports where they are relevant to operational visibility.
Signal sources
The Monitoring Stack receives signals primarily from:
- Live Stack — execution telemetry, order-processing metrics, venue-interaction status, position-tracking indicators, and runtime health from live trading operation.
- Backtesting Stack — run-progress metrics, execution-engine telemetry, resource-utilization signals, and status indicators from backtesting execution.
- Other running system parts — where observability support is needed, other relevant components may emit signals toward the Monitoring Stack.
The Monitoring Stack does not prescribe the internal implementation of signal emission — it provides integration surfaces that running system parts use to expose their observability-relevant outputs.
Outputs
The Monitoring Stack exposes operational visibility surfaces and produces monitoring-oriented outputs. Its outputs serve runtime awareness, health assessment, and alert-oriented workflows.
Operational visibility surfaces
Views, dashboards, and queryable surfaces that make running system behavior accessible — exposing telemetry, status, health, and runtime conditions to operators and operational tooling.
Health and status views
Structured representations of component and subsystem health — aggregated health assessments, status summaries, and readiness indicators that provide an at-a-glance operational picture.
Alert-oriented outputs
Notifications, alert events, and condition-triggered signals that surface noteworthy runtime conditions — degradations, failures, threshold breaches, and operational anomalies — to operators or downstream alert-handling systems.
Telemetry views
Queryable and visual representations of runtime telemetry — metric time series, histograms, throughput graphs, and latency distributions that allow operators to inspect and reason about runtime behavior.
Incident-relevant observability outputs
Correlated views, error aggregations, and diagnostic outputs that support incident identification and runtime issue characterization — making it possible to locate and understand problems in running system parts.
Monitoring-facing records
Where appropriate, the Monitoring Stack may persist monitoring-related records or artifacts — metric histories, alert records, status-change logs — to support operational continuity and post-incident reference. These records are monitoring artifacts, not analytical datasets.
Relationship to Running System Parts
The Monitoring Stack relates to running system parts through a consistent integration pattern: running components emit observability-relevant signals; the Monitoring Stack receives, integrates, and exposes them as operational visibility.
Live Stack. The strongest integration relationship. Live operation produces continuous telemetry, status, and health signals that require real-time operational visibility. The Monitoring Stack provides the integration surfaces through which Live execution is made observable — order-processing health, venue-interaction status, execution-engine metrics, and position-tracking indicators are visible through the Monitoring Stack while Live operation is running.
Backtesting Stack. Backtesting execution, particularly long-running or resource-intensive runs, benefits from runtime observability — run-progress tracking, resource-utilization visibility, and execution-engine health monitoring. The Monitoring Stack provides integration surfaces for Backtesting runtime signals where operational visibility is needed during execution.
Other running system parts. The Monitoring Stack may support observability for additional running components — infrastructure services, data-pipeline processes, or other system parts — where operational visibility is needed and those components can emit observability-relevant signals.
In all cases, the Monitoring Stack observes running system parts — it does not participate in their execution logic, influence their processing decisions, or alter their runtime behavior. The relationship is unidirectional at the signal level: running parts emit; the Monitoring Stack receives and exposes.
Relationship to Telemetry, Health, and Alert Surfaces
The Monitoring Stack is the integration layer between runtime signal emission and operational visibility consumption.
Telemetry integration. Running system parts emit metrics and telemetry in whatever form their implementation supports. The Monitoring Stack provides the receiving infrastructure and makes collected telemetry available through queryable and visual surfaces. The specific collection mechanisms and protocols are implementation concerns, not interface-level commitments.
Health integration. Running system parts expose health and readiness signals. The Monitoring Stack integrates these into aggregated health views that represent the operational state of the System's running parts. Health integration may be pull-based (the Monitoring Stack queries health endpoints) or push-based (components emit health signals), depending on the implementation pattern chosen.
Alert integration. The Monitoring Stack evaluates collected signals against monitoring conditions and produces alert-oriented outputs when noteworthy conditions are detected. Alert outputs may be consumed by operators directly, routed to external notification systems, or recorded as alert artifacts. The specific alert rules and thresholds are operational configuration, not architectural interface definitions.
Interface Boundaries
Runtime signals are the input basis. The Monitoring Stack consumes signals from running system parts — telemetry, metrics, status, health, and error indicators produced during active execution. It does not consume persisted analytical outputs, historical experiment results, or retrospective evaluation datasets.
Operational visibility is the output basis. The Monitoring Stack exposes its collected and integrated signals as operational visibility surfaces, health views, and alert-oriented outputs. It does not produce analytical evaluations, comparative assessments, or derived research artifacts.
The Monitoring Stack does not participate in runtime execution. It observes running system parts without influencing their processing logic, execution decisions, or runtime behavior. Signal flow is from running parts toward the Monitoring Stack, not the reverse.
The Monitoring Stack is not retrospective analysis. Evaluating persisted experiment results, comparing Strategy performance across runs, and producing derived analytical artifacts are Analysis Stack responsibilities. The Monitoring Stack is concerned with what is happening in running systems, not with evaluating what has already been stored.
Tool overlap does not change the interface boundary. When a single product or platform combines monitoring, orchestration, and execution-status concerns, the Monitoring Stack's interface responsibilities remain scoped to observability and operational visibility. The interface boundary is defined by architectural role, not by product packaging.
Storage surfaces may be used, not governed. Where the Monitoring Stack persists monitoring-related records, it writes to available storage surfaces but does not manage their organization, retention policies, or access governance.