Surge

Correlate Market Volume with App Errors for Fintech Teams

Fintech observability teams need external market context to quickly diagnose application issues. Surge provides real-time unusual volume alerts to correlate with internal system metrics.

The problem

When a fintech application experiences performance degradation, latency spikes, or error rate increases, distinguishing between an internal system fault and an external market event is a critical challenge. For instance, a sudden surge in trading volume for a specific asset might overload downstream services, but without this external context, developers might waste precious time investigating internal code or infrastructure that is operating as expected under extreme load.

Building this correlation capability requires integrating real-time market data into existing observability stacks (e.g., Datadog, Grafana), which involves significant data engineering, API management, and custom dashboard development, often delaying incident resolution.

How Surge solves it

1
Receive external market volume spike alerts to correlate with your application's internal performance metrics.
2
Quickly identify if system anomalies are self-inflicted or a reaction to unusual market activity.
3
Reduce mean time to resolution (MTTR) by providing crucial external context during incident investigations.

Concrete example


// Example: Sending Surge alert to an observability platform like Datadog via Python
import requests
import json
import os

SURGE_API_KEY = os.environ.get("SURGE_API_KEY")
DATADOG_API_KEY = os.environ.get("DATADOG_API_KEY")
DATADOG_APP_KEY = os.environ.get("DATADOG_APP_KEY")

def send_to_datadog(alert):
    headers = {
        "Content-Type": "application/json",
        "DD-API-KEY": DATADOG_API_KEY,
        "DD-APPLICATION-KEY": DATADOG_APP_KEY
    }
    payload = {
        "title": f"Surge: Unusual Volume for {alert['ticker']}",
        "text": f"Volume spike detected for {alert['ticker']} at {alert['timestamp']}. Current: {alert['current_volume']}, Avg 20d: {alert['avg_volume_20d']}. Correlate with app metrics.",
        "tags": ["source:surge", "market:anomaly", f"ticker:{alert['ticker'].lower()}"]
    }
    requests.post("https://api.datadoghq.com/api/v1/events", headers=headers, data=json.dumps(payload))

# Assume this function is triggered by a Surge webhook
def process_surge_webhook(alert_data):
    if alert_data.get('type') == 'volume_spike':
        send_to_datadog(alert_data)

# Example call (replace with actual webhook listener)
# process_surge_webhook({"type": "volume_spike", "ticker": "MSFT", "timestamp": "...", "current_volume": 10000000, "avg_volume_20d": 3000000})

Ready to try Surge?

Get notified when stocks and crypto trade unusually heavy.

Frequently asked questions

How can we integrate Surge alerts into our existing observability dashboards?
Surge delivers alerts via webhooks or API, allowing you to push these events into your observability platform (e.g., Datadog, Prometheus) as custom metrics or logs for correlation and visualization.
Will Surge help us identify if a bug caused an issue or if it's market-driven?
By correlating Surge's market alerts with your application's error rates, you can quickly discern if performance issues align with unusual market events, helping narrow down incident root causes.
Does Surge provide data for both stocks and crypto for correlation?
Yes, Surge offers volume spike alerts for both traditional stocks and a wide array of cryptocurrencies, providing comprehensive market context for all your fintech applications.

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