Skylight Analytics 24.05 Release Notes

Executive Summary

Welcome to our spring release of Skylight performance analytics. We're excited to bring this strong set of features:

1. New Cisco branding for Skylight Analytics user interface!
2. Sensor Capture Custom Properties for better sensor management
3. Telemetry Collector supporting a few Cisco MDT sensor paths out of the box
4. Live Mode for viewing for raw active session data
5. Alerting from Baselines for active session metrics

Headline Features

Cisco Branded User Interface

Accedian is now Cisco, so it was time for us to start looking the part! We hope you enjoy the refreshed login screen, navigation and general styling.

Sensor Capture Custom Properties

When you have a lot of sensors, it can be hard to manage and know which sensor is where. We've added the concept of custom properties to sensor capture configuration that:

1. Allows you to record important classification information in key value pair format
2. Filter inventory pages based on custom properties

In the future we'll do more with this field including expanding the concept to other sensor types, and supporting the use of properties to filter in other parts of the application, like dashboards and alert policies.

Telemetry Collector

We've had a tonne of customer interest in onboarding Cisco model driven telemetry data into Skylight to leverage our analytics capabilities alongside our end to end service view. To make this easier to do, and offer a "no code required" option, we're releasing a new Sensor agent focused on telemetry.

Cisco devices supporting MDT will now be able to be push data for 6 standard sensor paths to the new agent over gPRC.

Live Mode

Tired of waiting for data to be normalized and stored to be queryable? We hear your frustration, so added the ability to watch a specific session's data come in as RAW to help in circumstances where you're investigating live issues.

Note that the expediency of data in live mode is often most heavily impacted by your data reporting cadence. Some of our tools report in 1 minute intervals.

Alert on Baseline

Skylight's ability to maintain a baseline for session metrics is a huge help for users to understand if the current performance is normative for this time of the week. This release offers the option to set alert policies to use deviation from baseline as a dynamic threshold!

Additional Features

Quick Way To Zoom For More Detail

People want to see the most accurate results possible when using our analytics tool, but sometimes we need to use aggregated data due to data set volume and time intervals you're looking at. To improve the experience of diving deep we've added a faster way to up the granularity being used as you zoom in!

SaaS Application Usage

It was difficult to find what SaaS application definitions were being used, and by what sensors! We've added some indicators to the Application inventory to show what's being referenced, with links to those profiles and sensors.

Dictionary Validation

As more Cisco developers onboard more telemetry and 3rd party data types, we decided it was a good time to added some additional validation on custom dictionaries to avoid some awkward support situations.

Notable Fixes and Minor Improvements

To be updated at GA.