Skylight sensor: agents

Overview

Skylight sensor: agents are containerized microservice test agents capable of performing active testing on layers 3-7. Fully integrated with Skylight analytics, the agents can bring additional visibility and intelligence into service and network performance using a minimal footprint.

Each Skylight agent is deployed as a single-service multiple-use function, i.e there is one dedicated agent for each type of test, while each agent possibly could have multiple concurrent or queued tests defined.

All agents are intended to be "stateless" microservices. This means that no, or as little as possible configuration resides with the agent, instead it gets its orders from the orchestation services residing within Skylight analytics.

To communicate with the agent orchestration services the agents leverage a gateway container referred to as the "Roadrunner". Both management commands as well as measurement metrics flow through the Roadrunner service between the agent and Skylight analytics. The orchestration services keep track of which agents are connected, through which roadrunner, so that a command gets sent to the right agent instance.

Agents have different characteristics depending on its type, but all agents share the same set of initial setup parameters and many of the API configuration parameters are common between agents. The mode of operation can be different though depending on if the tests are more of the continous 24/7 type or more ad-hoc time-boxed functions.

Related Documentation and References

Agent installation guidelines