Connection Health
Your automation is only as good as NinjaTrader's connection to your broker. When that connection goes, alerts arrive at CrossTrade with nowhere to route, Account Manager monitors lose the prices they evaluate against, and nothing about it is obvious until you look. Connection Health covers the two ways it goes, one of which NinjaTrader will never tell you about.
Two ways a connection fails
| What happens | What NinjaTrader reports | What handles it |
|---|---|---|
| The connection drops | Disconnected | Auto-Reconnect |
| The connection holds, but ticks stop arriving | Connected | Data Watchdog |
The second row is the one that costs people money. NinjaTrader still shows the connection as live, so nothing raises an error, but quotes are frozen. Strategies act on a stale chart, and a monitor watching your session P/L evaluates it against prices that stopped updating an hour ago.
How they work together
Auto-Reconnect waits out a short delay, checks whether NinjaTrader recovered on its own, and reconnects if it did not. It gives up after five attempts so a reconnect loop never hammers your broker.
Data Watchdog watches real tick flow on a reference instrument and forces a recovery when the feed goes quiet for longer than your timeout, but only while the market is open, so weekends and holidays raise no false alarms.
Enable both on the same connection and they hand off: the Watchdog detects the stall and Auto-Reconnect performs the reconnect, using its own retry budget so attempts are never counted twice. With Auto-Reconnect off, the Watchdog runs the same recovery itself.
Setting them up
Both require CrossTrade NT8 Add-On v1.12.0 or later and are configured per connection under My Account, Trading in the Connection Health section. Both run inside the add-on on the machine where NinjaTrader is running, which is what lets them recover a connection while you are asleep or away from the VPS.