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By François Lefebvre

Skylight proof of concept: 4 hours to solve a problem that you have been working on for weeks

Network Performance,

Your problem is fairly common

Your application has been running slow for weeks and now you are facing conflicts with your colleagues; it’s a hot potato situation. (At this point, you can’t imagine being able to solve the complaints with a little as a proof of concept in only 4 hours.)

You go ahead and consult various manufacturers, each of which suggests a proof of concept (PoC). Most of them will inform you that the PoC, for configuration reasons, will require at least 3 to 4 weeks—time that you simply do not have.

Several months go by and by the end of those different PoCs, your Service Provider mentions SkyLIGHT PVX. However, you’re in the final phase of the project, and even if none of the evaluated manufacturers stands out, you say to yourself, “it’s too late”, and you can’t imagine spending another month evaluating another solution.

Never mind that! With the SkyLIGHT PVX network and application performance monitoring and management (NPM/APM) solution, you can conduct your proof of concept in just 3 days!

Proof of concept installation and configuration: you’ll be up and running in only 4 hours!

Let’s take a closer look at how it works

Let’s say it’s Friday morning.

1/ At 9:00 AM, the SkyLIGHT PVX Engineer installs the solution, conducts port mirroring, and configures the probe.

  1. Site configuration—to render the viewing personalized and understandable—is completed in just 2 minutes, thanks to the integration of the CSV file of your addressing plan.
  2. Your servers are discovered automatically
  3. Your applications are discovered automatically

2/ Within the hour:

  1. The solution has started to analyze—in real time—all of your network and application flows, and is already capable of providing measures of the performance :
    1. Of all your Web applications
    2. Of your users
    3. Of the database applications
    4. Of the remote sites: network performance, bandwidth composition
    5. Of your Citrix flows
    6. … we’ll stop here to avoid creating further frustration 🙂

The SkyLIGHT PVX Engineer then proceeds to configure the thresholds of the application and network response times for the two applications being evaluated.

3/ By 11:00 AM:

  1. A crowd gathers around the SkyLIGHT PVX Engineer,
  2. Red, green, and yellow are displayed for the performance of your applications and networks.

4/ By noon:

  1. It’s been too emotional; everyone takes off for lunch.

5/ By 2:00 PM:

We begin to highlight all of the problems and they are numerous … We can now move on to the next chapter, as the diagnostics have been conducted (and there were lots of them).

So, let’s take a look back at what causes your customer to decide to purchase the SkyLIGHT PVX solution.

Simple and strong diagnostics from a proof of concept

Our customer’s objectives were to:

  • Evaluate and understand the end-user experience (EURT) from an objective perspective
  • Optimize MTTR (Mean Time To Repair)
  • Monitor critical applications

Therefore, we started the diagnostic procedure. It’s often the most complex one to conduct in application performance analysis. However, it’s also very simple with SkyLIGHT PVX—a compliment that we hear quite often.

Here are a few examples of what network and application teams discover when deploying SkyLIGHT PVX in a proof of concept:

1. Excessive ARP requests

Proof of concept results: Excessive ARP requests

   2. Network loops, with packets that require fragmentation

Proof of concept results: Network loops, with packets that require fragmentation

3. Old Win Servers still requested (port unreachable)

Proof of concept results: Old Win Servers still requested (port unreachable)

4. Internal DNS queries towards Google Servers

Proof of concept results: Internal DNS queries towards Google Servers

5. Attacks from the 92.254.266.42 address, recognized as brute force attackers

Proof of concept results: Attacks recognized as brute force attackers

6. High levels of retransmission rates in certain sites

Proof of concept results: High levels of retransmission rates

7. Remote links saturated by a “TLS” application

Proof of concept results: Remote links saturated by a "TLS" application

8. Application performance varying according to the servers involved

Proof of concept results: Application performance varying according to the servers involved

9. In 4 clicks, the HTTP application performance by URL / HIT 

Proof of concept results: HTTP application performance by URL / HIT

(If you would like to learn more, please take a look at our article about troubleshooting a Web application.)

10. Understanding what database queries are causing an application slowdown 

Proof of concept results: Database queries causing an application slowdown

But for now, let’s stop here. I am convinced that you will want to read more about this, just as our customer did.

In 4 hours we were indeed capable of showing our customer the full range of advantages, in terms of speed and ease of use, that our SkyLIGHT PVX solution has to offer.