Skylight License Tiers (legacy Accedian ordering)
- 26 Apr 2024
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Skylight License Tiers (legacy Accedian ordering)
- Updated on 26 Apr 2024
- 4 Minutes to read
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Important Note
The following license tier information is only valid for customers who purchased Skylight from Accedian, and have not transferred their entitlements over to Cisco.
Skylight now has two licensing tiers when purchased through Cisco - find out more here - Skylight License Tiers
The software components of the Skylight Solution are sold using licenses for sessions (for active / synthetic testing) or flow analysis per minute (FA/M for passive analysis). You pay licenses for the number of concurrent test sessions you want to run and/or flows you want to analyze. All required software components are included in the license price.
Accedian offers several tiers of licenses with incrementing functionality.
Here's a high level overview:
| Tier | Summary |
|---|---|
| Base | Basic PMs and all the software needed to get you going. |
| Enhance | Take everything in Base and add the ability to get the highest granularity and all of the PMs Accedian has to offer |
| Work | Take everything in Enhance and add basic dashboarding and visualization capabilities using Skylight Analytics |
| View | Take everything in View and add the ability to analyze, explore and troubleshoot using Skylight Analytics |
| Learn | Take everything in View and add the ability to understand and generate actionable insight using Skylight Analytics leveraging ML and AI capabilities |
Session Data Generation Tiers
Both the Base and Enhance tiers focus on data generation, and different with respect to:
- the types of sessions they support
- the metrics and aggregations they support
- the sampling rate
- the collection frequency
Notable exclusions
- These tiers do not include Skylight performance analytics or Sensor: capture capabilities.
Comparing Tiers - Session Types
| Session Type | BASE | ENHANCE | WORK & ABOVE | Quantity of Licenses Consumed |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| PAA | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | 1 per configured session (one license for both ends of the session) |
| SOAM / Y.1731 | ✗ | ✔ | ✔ | 1 per configured DMM session (one license for each end of the session) |
| SA / SA Metrics | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | 1 per configured SA configuration |
| Regulator | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | 1 per configured regulator |
| FlowMETER | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | 1 per configured unidirectional FlowMETER |
| FlowBroker Capture | ✗ | ✔ | ✔ | 1 per capture rule. A rule is unidirectional. |
| TWAMP | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | 1 per configured session |
| 2xOneWay session | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | 1 per configured session |
| Echo (UDP and ICMP) | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | 1 per configured session |
| ETH-DM/LB/VS | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | 1 per configured session |
| SAT | ✔ | ✔ (centralized) | ✔ | 1 per configured test (1564 , 2544) |
| Policy, System Health, Port and Shaper metrics | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | No licenses consumed |
| ETH-DM/LB/VS | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | 1 per configured session |
| Sensor agent actuate (TWAMP, UDP and ICMP) | ✗ | ✗ | ✔ | 1 per configured session |
| Sensor agent trace (paris traceroute) | ✗ | ✗ | ✔ | 1 per configured session |
| Sensor agent transfer (TCP, HTTP(s), FTP & DNS) | ✗ | ✗ | ✔ | 1 per configured session |
| Sensor agent throughput (RFC6349 TCP) | ✗ | ✗ | ✔ | 1 per configured session |
Comparing Tiers - Capabilities
| Functional Area | BASE | ENHANCE |
|---|---|---|
| Collection Frequency | As low as 1 minute | As low as 1 second |
| Sampling Rate | As low as 10s for Flowmeter | As low as 1s (or lower) for Flowmeter |
| Metric aggregations | Min / Max / Average / Counts of key metrics | All document metrics |
| Orchestrator High Availability Option | Cold-Standby | Redundant deployment |
Work Tier
The Work tier introduces Skylight performance analytics for use with our session based sensor data as well as an orchestration function for sensor capture and sensor agents. On top of the capabilities listed for the Enhance tier, find below some of the features included with Work tier (and some of the notable exclusions that are only accessible the next tier up).
Data ingestion
- ability to provision custom data cleaning rules
- ability to provision time exclusion periods for maintenance windows
- ability to ingest OpenMetrics data from sensor agents
- alerting is only available at View tier and above
- 3rd party data onboarding via Accedian Professional Services is only available at View tier and above
Dashboarding
- ability to create custom dashboards
- ability to schedule dashboard report
Analysis
- ability to drill down into the Analytics advanced analysis troubleshooting module
Sensor orchestration
- ability to provision sensor capture
- capture sensor settings, zone and application definitions, upgrade of sensors
- ability to provision sensor agents
- sensor agent management, status and test session configuration
Access control and User management
- ability to group users for resource sharing and data access permissions
- portal user functionality is only available for View tier and above
Reporting
- data set CSV reports are only available for View tier and above
- custom reports via Accedian Professional Services are only available at View tier and above
Data management
- default data retention for 1 minute source data for 90 days
- ability to associate up to 5 metadata categories to objects (View tier and above allow for up to 50)
View Tier
The View tier upgrades Skylight performance analytics feature set from what is offered in Work tier. These additional features are applicable when using our session based sensor data, and adds support for capture data analytics. Lastly, View tier is required to utilize the Skylight Interceptor product.
Data ingestion
- threshold alerting
- 3rd party data onboarding via Accedian Professional Services
Access control and User management
- portal user functionality
Reporting
- data set CSV reports
- custom reports via Accedian Professional Services
Data management
- default data retention for 1 minute source data for 90 days
- ability to associate up to 50 metadata categories to objects
- ability to purchase extended data retention
Learn Tier
Our Learn tier is where we open up additional machine learning capabilities.
- Roadmap to provide AI powered proactive notifications on correlated session issues
© 2024 Accedian Networks Inc. All rights reserved. Accedian®, Accedian Networks®, the Accedian logo™, Skylight™, Skylight Interceptor™ and per-packet intel™, are trademarks or registered trademarks of Accedian Networks Inc. To view a list of Accedian trademarks visit: http://accedian.com/legal/trademarks/.
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