About Performance Sessions

Performance sessions allow you to monitor the performance of services on your network by capturing a wide range of performance metrics.

In the Sessions page of Skylight orchestrator, you can set up various types of Layer 2 and Layer 3 sessions.

This section gives you some background on how the Skylight Solution measures network performance.

How the Skylight Solution Measures Network Performance

The Skylight Solution supervises network services by injecting tiny streams of frames or packets into the network under test. The streams are tiny with respect to bandwidth and frame or packet rate. The injected streams are affected by the network in the same way as real payload traffic when transported from the source (or sender) to the destination (or reflector). Measurement streams are affected by disturbances such as network overload, failing links, malfunctioning routers, misconfigured network elements, and so on. The network performance is measured by analyzing session data upon receipt and by correlating the results from several sessions.

The following diagram shows a measurement stream injected into a network. The network under test is seen as a black box to simplify the model of object under test.

Terminology

In Skylight orchestrator, we use the following terms to talk about performance sessions.