Tick to Trade latency measurement

Last night I meet up with an old friend for drinks who's currently working for mid-size market making firm and we started discussing tick to trade latency -- the period of time from the moment a particular market data tick message appears, full order book update, algo processing, order execution, and fill acknowledgment. We started discussing how to  does accurately measure tick to trade latency when the fastest systems on the street today are sub ~10 usec. Passive network taps have become essential in low latency system monitoring -- Off host processing of event metrics will minimize the impact of code instrumentation and enable measurement of end-to-end latency across applications and infrastructure components.

A slew of new application level tools are available that can time various components of your tick to trade process chain with deterministic timers with 100ns accuracy and little to no jitter such systems should be highly efficient and minimally invasive API calls without requiring context switches or kernel mode execution.