360° Network and Application Performance Monitoring and Visibility

SkyLIGHT™ PVX provides 360° network and application performance monitoring (NPM and APM), enabling complete visibility across all types of network infrastructure: physical, virtualized, software-defined and cloud. With a full-featured set of NPM network and APM application performance monitoring tools, SkyLIGHT PVX tracks all network flows and application transactions—north-south traffic and east-west traffic from, to, inside, and between data centers and virtual machines—and 100% of the applications accessed by 100% of users, including websites on the public internet, Citrix applications, and SaaS applications, among others.

Network and application performance monitoring: real time and back in time

Offering a full suite of network and application performance monitoring tools, SkyLIGHT PVX analyzes 100% of network traffic and 100% of application transactions in real time to produce hundreds of detailed metrics including traffic volumes, device and application performance, web application issues, communication and transaction errors, and other key network and application performance indicators. SkyLIGHT PVX quickly identifies overworked network devices, application latency, web application slow performance, and other performance issues in web applications. These performance metrics are centralized and stored in a time-series data store to provide a rich—and actionable—history of overall network and application activity as well as the performance of individual network devices and application components.

SkyLIGHT PVX enables IT professionals to rapidly identify network and application performance trends and exceptions. SkyLIGHT PVX makes it simple to compare current performance with a reference baseline as well as to identify when new network or application behaviors first appeared.

Drilling down: finding the needle in the haystack made easy

SkyLIGHT PVX’s analytics generate overviews for IT teams—helpdesk, network, data center, and application—to understand the big picture and quickly identify legacy application and web application issues while also providing a full suite of network performance management tools and application performance management tools.

SkyLIGHT PVX also provides instant access to NPM and APM performance details, including performance issues in web applications, directly from the dashboard. The drill down capabilities for rapid fault isolation allow IT teams to accurately and intuitively screen the “haystack” and get right to the “needle” within a few mouse clicks.

360° performance indicators: zero blind spots

SkyLIGHT PVX computes hundreds of performance metrics in real-time for every flow traversing the network. IT analysts have access to a comprehensive set of metrics to pinpoint hosts, network, infrastructure, and application performance issues through a single troubleshooting interface:

• client-side errors and configuration issues
• network usage, error, and latency metrics
• server-side error indicators
• application response and error metrics
• data volume issues and transfer times

With their intuitive configuration, SkyLIGHT PVX’s application performance tools enable IT professionals to quickly achieve outcomes such as:

• How to measure application performance
• How to monitor application performance
• How to troubleshoot applications
• And much more

From network maps to conversations: a bird’s eye view

With a fast-changing and highly complex IT infrastructure, obtaining answers to simple questions such as “who’s using what?” and “at what level of performance?” is not easy. SkyLIGHT PVX helps IT teams understand the geography of their network and application flows, identifying where data volumes are high, response times long, and errors frequent.

With these network and application maps in hand, IT analysts are simply a click away from determining impacted network and application conversations. At a glance, they can see how many users are affected, where they are located, and for how long they have been experiencing a performance degradation.

From network flows to application transaction visibility

End-users evaluate business applications on their overall, end-to-end performance and availability. Users can’t tell which network or application components are not performing up to expectations; they just know that something is slower than it should be, in turn impacting their own job performance. When troubleshooting network and application performance, an IT team can’t restrict its investigation to just a single portion of the network and application footprint—instead they require visibility into the full “performance path”.

In addition to application discovery and dependency mapping, SkyLIGHT PVX reveals the application performance path by displaying both the network flows and the application conversations inside of them.

Performance troubleshooting requires understanding the respective impacts of network and application infrastructure on each other. SkyLIGHT PVX addresses both of these performance aspects with a single, easy-to-use platform for network and application performance monitoring and management.

Application chains and dependencies: from network flows to transaction details

Application delivery is never as simple as a client directly connecting to a server. In reality, application transactions go through numerous infrastructure tiers, for example:

• LAN and WAN
• security/filtering devices
• common network services (e.g., name resolution, authentication)
• load balancers
• WAN optimization appliances

The application layer brings its own set of complexities, including dependencies on common services and back–ends such as application servers, storage, and database servers.

Understanding how application chains work is therefore key. SkyLIGHT PVX shows how each application tier impacts the end-user experience when troubleshooting performance degradations.

SkyLIGHT PVX tracks all network flows and application transactions—from, to, inside, and between data centers and virtual machines—and 100% of the applications accessed by 100% of users, including websites on the public internet, Citrix applications, and SaaS applications, among others.