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Skylight performance monitoring’s traffic compression capability

If you commute, and could reduce highway traffic from 10,000 vehicles down to 20-50, would you be interested?  Of course you would.  Who wouldn’t be?  You’d be able to arrive on time, every time, and never be late again for an important event or appointment. But, short of having a fleet of flying cars, we can’t help you there.

What we have done, though, is invented a way to dramatically reduce network traffic- the type of burdensome traffic created by packet capture.  This breakthrough is especially crucial for the cloud, where you have to pay for network traffic.  Some people might even argue that it’s more important than reducing highway traffic.  After all, sometimes you can find a faster route to your destination.  But, all network congestion does is create unhappy users.

The source of this problem is that traditional packet capture sends 100% of the traffic data over the network to a capture appliance.  It’s far too bandwidth hungry, especially for the cloud – and basically doesn’t work. 

In fact, according to a survey of 400 IT professionals conducted by iLand, 43% of application migrations to Microsoft Azure and 57% of migrations to Amazon Web Services stalled or failed.  

That’s NOT good!  Much of this is because of an inability to monitor apps deployed in the cloud and likely only shows the respondents that were willing to admit they have a problem.  We haven’t heard of any cases where migration teams end up saying, “our migration to the cloud went so smoothly, we took the rest of the day off” /sarc. 

Once you move apps to the cloud, you can no longer see the network traffic between servers, VMs, and containers.  This traffic can be very heavy, which is why high bandwidth networks are used as backend networks. 

This is absolutely true in the cloud where backend network traffic is 1) not all yours and 2) can surge at any time.  By default, cloud packet capture should only send a miniscule amount of traffic data on the backend network to avert application performance degradation. 

To solve this problem, Accedian has developed an incredibly powerful network traffic compression capability for the Skylight NAPM solution. It reduces the amount of network traffic transferred for a 10Gbps down to an exceedingly small 2-5 Mbps – a 2000% to 5000% reduction. 

That means you can monitor between 2000-5000 VM network paths and still only generate the same 10Gbps that a single unfiltered packet capture interface generates.  That’s a huge reduction

Skylight metadata technology means that Skylight is completely scalable to monitor small to extremely large cloud deployments. It allows you to see 100% of all network and application transaction traffic, without compromise.

Skylight is also software only, meaning that it runs as a VM app and can be initiated instantly when new applications or services are started.  It can also be easily scaled back when the app or service is ended, to reduce cloud overhead and charges.  This means that it’s elastic, just like the cloud. 

The illustration above shows just how significant Skylight metadata technology is.  The image on the left illustrates how much unfiltered packet traffic travels to a capture appliance. 

If this is sent over the backend network, it will generate a great deal of congestion leading to latency.  Skylight metadata is a pinpoint in a large network pipe – literally creating no impact on network performance.

Monitoring network and application traffic in the cloud age required a rethink – so we rethought it. Older methods that worked well for years, don’t scale and aren’t cost effective for public cloud infrastructures. 

We invented the metadata technology to help ensure that your cloud-based apps work as well as they did on-premise.  And, Metadata can also help your on-premise network and application monitoring perform better and reduce the amount of stress impacting your on-premise networks.

We also acknowledge – we can’t do much to fix congested highway traffic.  But, we could and did do something to reduce network and application performance monitoring traffic. 

We’ve disrupted burdensome packet capture congestion and freed your network to do what it was made for – delivering an outstanding user experience.  And, we made it incredibly affordable, as well.

Metadata is so innovative that it might even put a smile on your face while you’re stuck in horrible highway traffic, wondering if you’re ever going to make it to your destination.

Well, at least you’ll know that you’ve saved your company a ton of money, while keeping all your app users happy.  Not a direct substitute, but a good feeling to know.

But don’t just take our word for it. See what our customers are saying:

A network architect at a recruiting/HR firm with 501-1,000 employees says:

https://www.itcentralstation.com/product_reviews/accedian-skylight-review-60187-by-mario-oosters

A freelance IT consultant at SPW (Service Public de Wallonie) says:

https://www.itcentralstation.com/product_reviews/accedian-skylight-review-60617-by-freelanc5c8d

Experience the Power of Metadata. Download our Skylight free trial today.

Check out part 2 of this series which discusses how metadata benefits network performance monitoring and application performance monitoring TCO. It reduces cloud performance monitoring costs by 300-900% compared to hardware-based performance monitoring tools.