Excerpt from EMA Report:

“Accedian offers Skylight, an end-to-end synthetic and traffic-based monitoring solution for networks and networked applications. The platform is based on a number of homegrown technologies and acquired solutions that Accedian has recently combined into a unified architecture. Skylight combines network performance monitoring and application performance monitoring (NAPM), together with centralized management and analytics supported by machine learning and AI. The solution consists of three core architectural components.

Battle-Tested Synthetic and Traffic-based NPM

At the heart of Skylight are a series of software and hardware sensors that perform a variety of data collection and data generation functions. These sensors, which are deployable in data centers, enterprise networks, the cloud and at the network edge can capture packet data and convert the data into metadata for analysis by Skylight. Skylight sensor control can also generate synthetic traffic for active monitoring, which can be used to validate network performance or to emulate application traffic for end user experience monitoring, And, more intriguing, Skylight sensor on-premises and cloud traffic monitoring capabilities turns that traffic into high-density metadata to provide performance indicators from the network layer to application transactions with the finest granularity, while reducing the amount of data sent over the network to centralize the metadata captured in a highly distributed environment.

Managing these sensors is Accedian Skylight orchestrator, a central management platform for Skylight. Orchestrator manages the lifecycle of Skylight sensors, from initial provisioning to re-configuration for new monitoring requirements. This central management capability reduces the complexity of instrumenting a large network with Skylight.

Finally, Skylight performance analytics delivers next-generation analytics capabilities. Skylight performance analytics is delivered as-a-service by Accedian. It analyzes both passive wire data and active synthetic data that Skylight collects. This allows network operators to visualize, analyze, and take action from a single viewpoint.

Skylight performance analytics can also collect and process third-party monitoring data and combine it with its analysis of the data it collects from Skylight. This gives IT operations a much broader view of the network. Skylight collects third-party data from a half-dozen sources out of the box, including NetFlow, SNMP MIBs, and traps from network infrastructure vendors. Accedian also offers a software development kit for integrating and collecting data from other IT operations management platforms.”

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