Skylight Analytics 20.08 Release Notes

Executive Summary

What was intended to be a light, breezy summer release turned out not to be - our design team really outdid themselves and we're thrilled to bring you a ton of new content to address our customer's operational efficiency and portal enablement goals.

• Topology Widget that will change how you spot and investigate issues by allowing you to visualize connections and performance
• TopN Pattern Clustering that makes spotting trends or correlated behaviour easy
• User Group Permissions for Capture Data to compliment implicitly filter what data a user can access through Skylight Analytics
• and much more!

Headline Features

Topology Widget

Most people don't think about sessions or flows from A to B, they think about topology... that's what nearly every investigation needs to boil down to.

A new widget is now available for Analysis and Dashboards which visualizes relationships/connections between session topology elements or capture ip-addresses. Elements are plotted using up to 4 dimensions (x, y, color, size) on a scatter or force-directed graph and users can drill down on a sequence of connections to see how relationships and performance evolve across the connections to assess how individual pieces of topology affect their peers.

TopN Pattern Clustering

Efficiency is everything in a troubleshooting situation, and this feature drastically reduces the “stare and compare” required to see bad trends and correlate to a root cause.

Drill down trend lines are now automatically analyzed using a time series clustering algorithm to create groups of similar trend lines for rapid selection and analysis. Top trends can be used as a navigation item to filter the rows in the TopN table to those matching the pattern and all or some rows can be selected for either additional filtering on dashboards or transfer to analysis.

User Group Permissions for Capture Data

In the 20.06 release we gave you the ability to use metadata to restrict the data that members of a user group could see (i.e. specific regions, product lines, customers). In this release we've added support for limiting based on Sensor: On-Prem and Cloud capture devices, Zones definitions and applications.

Additional Features

User Group Starting Dashboard

Users within this user group will land on the starting dashboard when entering the application.

Analysis Template

Proliferation of custom templates can cause confusion so we’re implementing the same navigation and sharing mechanism as dashboards.

Favorite filters

Save and load filters when using your dashboards and during analysis sessions.

Filters from drill downs

Select any metadata from drill downs for additional filtering or transfer to analysis

Lasso zoom for geo maps

Quickly focus on select areas within geo maps and avoid capturing mouse scrolls.

Quantiles for capture based metrics

Avoid a lack of precision in larger time intervals/broad data aggregations by using quantiles to compute a better min / median / max.

Picture widget

You can now add images to your dashboard - access this widget from the More... menu when editing a widget.

Arrange analysis charts by filter set

Group performance charts in a more granular fashion during an analysis session.

Congestion Metric (Proof of concept)

We've added a proof of concept metric that is based on TWAMP delay P25 minus the baseline of Delay min. Delay P25 by itself has been found to be a good indication of network congestion, and by subtracting the baseline of Delay min, you can get a measurement that is independent of the distance packets across TWAMP sessions need to travel and compare apples to apples across your network.

Notable fixes and improvements

• analytics: Configure metric filters within the dictionary search
• analytics: Increased the drilldown default top-n limit to 25
• analytics: Clean up gradients in PDF exports
• analytics: Tables with missing data are still rendered
• analytics: Protect composite metrics from use in advanced computation widgets
• analytics: Correct object count in the threshold widget
• analytics: Correct object count when there is a global exclusion filter
• analytics: Display sum instead of avg in the legend when using a sum/count aggregate
• analytics: Display per-second units for data averaged per second in charts/legends
• analytics: Display per-second units in table cells
• analytics: Don't override object selections from the object search in the dictionary search
• analytics: Editing a cloned text widget no longer edits original
• analytics: Filter out invalid metadata categories when making metric/aggregate requests
• analytics: Fix filtered-table toggle, clear on filterset select
• analytics: Fixed filtering errors for alert drilldowns
• analytics: Correct object count for group by with missing metadata
• analytics: Fix issues when changing the aggregation of sort by in drilldowns
• analytics: Object counts for secondary metrics in timeseries group by
• analytics: Guard against empty datasets in table cells (should be a failed dataset)
• analytics: Include group by filters in drilldowns
• analytics: Fix display values for metadata with : delimited values
• analytics: More consistent color scheme for dashboards, historical colors
• analytics: Populate monitored object filter list on initial load
• analytics: Remove dashboard table selection that bled higher context filters into quick-filter
• analytics: Reset the metric brush when changing interval/zoom
• analytics: Retain the empty '---' groupBy in performance charts
• analytics: Trend lines for composite metrics with object filters
• analytics: Better matching for dictionary searches
• analytics: Use aggregation in displayValue if all series have the same data type / aggregation
• analytics: fixed interval time/date picker to not update on inc/dec
• analytics: application name filter takes strings not numbers
• analytics: Prevent active links in text widget
• auth: Support product tours
• legacy: Dashboard support for multi-role users
• data: Metadata permissions limits
• data: Additional SNMP metrics support
• data: Fix search by topology
• data: Fix composite metric processing
• data: Add MOS to the list of pre-aggregated capture metrics
• data: Add layerOneRxBWUtil and layerOneTxBWUtil to pct mappings
• data: Add the 'transport' layer to the TRANSPORT_LAYERS array
• data: Clamp PVQL timeseries timestamps according to granularity
• data: Conditionally divide traffic metrics by 2 if there aren't oriented filters
• data: Convert subsets from object to string (name) if any were persisted as { name, id }
• data: Don't average 'time' unit based metrics in capture data
• data: Drop empty groupBy columns from objectId groupBy timeseries requests
• data: Fix group by object count matching to explicitly match the grouping
• data: Guard against empty object ids in object search results
• data: New units and pct mappings for SNMP metrics
• data: Reverse IP addresses when passing to the DNS resolver
• data: Reverse the inclusion check for object metadata to grouping -> entry
• data: Use normalized values when formatting the significant figures in a numeric value
• data: fix smb command format in PVQL query
• legacy: Normalize the output from the bin color picker
• network: Allow user to update lat lon when the value is negative
• platform: Guard tab underline animation from missing DOM elements
• reports: Better handle breaking characters in titles
• reports: Better quality pdfs on Windows
• reports: Don't include empty default section in reports
• reports: Destroy browser context between report runs
• reports: Proper url formatting, re-fetch scheduled reports on failure
• reports: Retry process when headless UI fails to generate valid report file
• settings: Adjusted layout for alerting conditions
• settings: Convert application names to ids for application alert policies
• settings: Fix threshold transition on save, fix threshold metric list toggle
• settings: Overflow on vendor nav for ingestion settings
• skylight: Fix boot ordering to avoid race conditions
• skylight: Added warning message to refresh whenever there is an update to the UI
• skylight: Hide application overflow
• skylight: Render the user menu outside of the parent container to avoid z-index issues