Skylight Analytics 21.12 Release Notes

Executive Summary

Our 21.06 release was a doozy, and actually led to quite a bit of feature work and optimizations being continuously delivered to you without a major revision. In parallel to that we continued to work on some larger features to let you start the new year off right!

1. More sensitive session alerts - better support for detecting issues only seen with highly granular data, and we now support alerting on 3rd party data!
2. Support for more session data types - we added support for a bunch of highly requested Accedian data types including Flex 100!
3. New way to manage your Sensor: capture - brand new integrated UI and REST APIs for the management AND support for PCAPs!

Headline Features

Alerting Improvements

Percent of Interval in Violation

• The pre-21.12 alert service for session data required the violation to be SUSTAINED for the length of the interval, with a minimum interval of 1 minute - not ideal if you're trying to use Accedian's ultra granular data to find micro-bursts!
• Analytics now give users the option to define the % of the interval was in violation

3rd Party Alerts

Our previous alerting service relied on the data source providing an interval, or duration, that the measurement represented. We use that value in multiple locations to determine how long thresholds were breached (a much more interesting and applicable measure than a simple count of violations). Turns out a lot of 3rd party sources do not report this metric, so we figure it out ourselves or default to a system setting.

New Sensor: Capture Management Tools

• Support for provisioning of sensors, applications and zones in the settings section of Analytics
• Support for scheduling and retrieval PCAP files via Analytics!

Support for Flex 100

Nobody does hardware like Accedian! Flex is out exciting new hardware platform that's going to rock your world - seriously check it out!. Flex data is fully supported by Skylight Analytics.

We're also using Roadrunner in a new standalone mode to convert Flex100 OpenMetrics data into CSVs for delivery to third party solutions!

Additional features

Repeat Offenders

We supported a couple custom/purpose built dashboard types called Object Violation and Repeat Offenders back in Analytics 21.03, but they were deprecated in 21.06. To replace their functionality, we augmented the aggregate dashboard widget to support visualizing this historical view of which objects have been violating over the past time intervals.

Interval Comparison

Pre-21.06 Analytics also supported a dedicated report type called Interval Comparison that allowed you to compare the performance of a set of objects from one time period to another - think of comparing before and after a maintenance window to see the change in performance.

We have now moved this functionality into the Analysis module! Select a second time frame and see the aggregate performance change as a new metric in many of the widgets.

HTTP Time Chart

See the time line of a page load event!
Access this tool via the table widget in the Analysis module by including the "Page Load ID" category in your selection when analyzing HTTP traffic, or by using the new view called "Template: HTTP Pages".

Dive down into the Flow Details

Analytics does a great job of aggregating 100s of 1000s of flows into high level abstractions - this helps bubble up the serious issues - akin to the wide angle lens on a camera in that it sees everything boardly. But sometimes you need a microscope, and now with access to the flow details from the Analysis module, that's what you've got!

Better Filtering for IPs and Zones

Two big improvements in this area:

1. OR Filter options for client/server and source/dest IPs and zones categories cause sometimes you don’t know…

2. Ability to use a subnet mask in IP filters (i.e. 10.10.10.0/28)

Metadata Aliasing

Some times the metadata category name is not the name or format that you want to expose to users, so now administrators can add aliases to session metadata catgory names that can be used in place of the originial category name in the UI (dashboards and analysis).

Settings:

In use on a dashboard:

Session Metric Aliasing

Metric aliasing is already available on a per widget basis when provisioning metrics, and also available globally for capture based metrics. This release we also added the ability for admins to globally alias session metrics! This should help tremendously for all the third party data sources we're starting to see people integrate with!

Settings:

In use on a dashboard:

Notable Feature Deprecations

Access to the legacy Nevrax UI for Capture Sensor is no longer available as it has been removed and replaced with the new orchestration tool set.

Notable fixes and minor improvements

• To be provided at GA