Deployment, Range and Sizing
- 15 Sep 2023
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Deployment, Range and Sizing
- Updated on 15 Sep 2023
- 4 Minutes to read
- Contributors
- Print
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Article Summary
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The following are guidelines for picking the right virtual or physical sensor.
Overview
Optimized for network packet capture and real-time flow analysis
The Skylight sensor appliance family is designed to perform Skylight’s real time traffic analysis to its maximum scale. The appliance family features a mix of resources to monitor portable, site, and data center environments.
Important
Note that all physical appliances (Skylight PVX and datastore) are being discontinued and replaced with virtualized sensor capture and Skylight Analytics cloud-based suite.
The sensors together with Skylight software provides a complete network and application performance monitoring (NAPM) solution for on-premise and cloud performance monitoring.
Expand and optimize network and application performance monitoring
The Skylight sensors are scalable, start with a small deployment and add more CPU / RAM / SSD as needed. Below is a table with suggested resource settings starting at 250k flows analyzed per minute (FAM) for an entry level configuration.
Sensor sizing
Capture sensor reporting bandwidth
The capture sensors analyze the live traffic in real-time, calculating flow metrics that are sent to Skylight analytics for visualization, alerting and troubleshooting. The amount of metrics data produced varies with the live traffic, and depends on level of analysis within the capture sensor. Below are typical figures derived together with our customers from multiple deployments.
| Level of analysis enabled on capture sensor | Typical average reporting in percent of captured bandwidth |
|---|---|
| L3-4 | 1-3% |
| L7 partial | 4-6% |
| L7 full | 5-9% |
Good practice is to disable L7 protocols / analysis that you don't use to save on reporting bandwidth and metrics storage in Skylight Analytics.
Virtual sensors sizing guidelines
No two networks are the same, so the table below is to be seen as a rough estimate of deployment size for growing number of flows per minute / bandwidth.
Your deployment may require less or more resources depending on the traffic mix, but usually these numbers are sufficient.
The traffic mix used as reference is based on our experience from multiple customer deployments and is a weighted mix of TCP, DNS, http, https and application traffic like database and video calls.
| Maximum flow analysis per minute | 250k | 500k | 1M | 2M |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Typical PPS rates | 250k | 500k | 1M | 2M |
| Minimum CPU frequency | 2.4 GHz | 2.4 GHz | 2.4 GHz | 2.4 GHz |
| vCPUs (threads)* | 6 | 10 | 12 | 14 |
| RAM ** | 16-18 GB | 28-29 GB | 40 GB | 96 GB |
| Storage - Enterprise class SSD, high WR | 32 GB | 48 GB | 80 GB | 128 GB |
*) On a system with hyperthreading, each physical CPU core typically expose two vCPU or threads to the operating sydstem.
**) RAM usage for the 250k and 500k options depends on parsing for preconfigured SaaS applications which adds up to 2GB RAM if fully enabled. Use the higher value in the table if SaaS application parsing will be enabled
Physical, appliance sensors - NOTE - all are discontinued, please refer to virtual sensor sizing above
Micro and portable sensors
 |  | |
|---|---|---|
| Skylight micro | Skylight mobile | |
| CPU (core/thread/frequency) | 4/4/2.2 GHz | 12/12/2.0 GHz |
| RAM | 16 GB | 32 GB |
| Storage - Enterprise class SSD | 240 GB | 1.92 TB |
| Data redundancy option | no | no |
| Network interfaces | 3 x 1 G | 3 x 1G + 2 x 10G SFP+ + 2 |
| Chassis | Portable - 25.4 x 22.6 x 4.3 | Portable - 25.4 x 22.6 x 4.3 |
| Weight | < 2kg – (rack mount kit as option) | < 2kg - (rack mount kit as option) |
| Capacity | ||
| Maximum flow analysis per minute | n/a | 200k |
| Packets per second | 100k | 250k |
Standard site sensors
 |  | |
|---|---|---|
| Skylight 110 | Skylight 120 | |
| CPU (core/thread/frequency) | 8/16/2.1 GHz | 6/12/3.4 GHz |
| RAM | 32 GB | 64 GB |
| Storage - Enterprise class SSD | 1.92 TB | 3.84 TB |
| Data redundancy option | yes | yes |
| Network interfaces | 8 x 1 G | 6 x 1G + 2 x 10G SFP+ |
| Chassis | 1U rack | 1U rack |
| Weight | 22 kg | 22 kg |
| Additional interface options | ||
| 4 x 1G copper | yes | yes |
| 2 x 10G SFP+ | yes | yes |
| 2 x 10G SFP+ & 2 x 1G copper | yes | yes |
| 4 x 10G SFP+ | yes | yes |
| 2 x 40G QSFP+ | no | yes |
| Capacity | ||
| Maximum flow analysis per minute | 500k | 1M |
| Packets per second | 350k | 500k |
High performance datacenter - datastore (Skylight PVX only)
 |  |  | |
|---|---|---|---|
| PVX 210 | PVX 220 | PVX 240 | |
| Characteristics | Datastore (Skylight PVX only) | Datastore (Skylight PVX only) | Datastore (Skylight PVX only) |
| CPU (core/thread/frequency) | Xeon 6134 8C / 16T @ 3.2 GHz | Xeon 6132 14C / 28T @ 2.6 GHz | 2x Xeon 6254 18C / 36T @ 3.1 GHz |
| RAM | 128 GB | 256 GB | 512 GB |
| Storage - Enterprise class SSD | 5.76 TB | 7.68 TB | 11.52 TB | 11.52 TB | 26.88 TB | 38.40 TB |
| Data redundancy option | yes | yes | yes |
| Network interfaces | 6 x 1G + 2 x 10G SFP+ | 6 x 1G + 2 x 10G SFP+ | 6 x 1G + 2 x 10G SFP+ |
| Chassis | 2U rack | 2U rack | 2U rack |
| Weight | 27 kg | 27 kg | 28 kg |
| Additional interface options | |||
| 4 x 1G copper | yes | yes | yes |
| 2 x 10G SFP+ | yes | yes | yes |
| 2 x 10G SFP+ & 2 x 1G copper | yes | yes | yes |
| 4 x 10G SFP+ | yes | yes | yes |
| 2 x 40G QSFP+ | yes | yes | yes |
| Capacity | |||
| Maximum flow analysis per minute | 1M | 2M | 4M |
| Packets per second | 600k | 800k | 1M |
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