Deployment, Range and Sizing

The following are guidelines for picking the right virtual sensor.

Overview

Optimized for network packet capture and real-time flow analysis

The Provider Connectivity Assurance Sensor Capture family is designed to perform real time traffic analysis to its maximum scale. The virtual appliance sizings feature a range to monitor portable, site, and data center environments.

Expand and optimize network and application performance monitoring

The caoture 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 100k 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 Provider Connectivity Assurance 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.

Good practice is to disable L7 protocols / analysis that you don't use to save on reporting bandwidth and metrics storage in 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.

*) On a system with hyperthreading, each physical CPU core typically expose two vCPU or threads to the operating sydstem.