Skylight platform

The Skylight solution is comprised of two parts:

1. Sensors for generating active or passive network performance data across layer 2 to 7
2. Centralized services for management, data handling, analytics and security

The Skylight platform is where these centralized services run. The services deployed on the platform will vary depending on the solution requirements.

Typical Platform Configurations

Essentials

For customers that only wish to leverage Accedian for our ultra granular performance data for enhanced visibility, the Skylight platform can be deployed with only the following sets of services:

• Sensor management
• Session management
• Data streamer

Advantage

For customers that want to leverage Accedian's tools and insights with their network performance data, additional services can be deployed on the platform:

• performance analytics

Platform Service Descriptions

Gateway

Skylight platform is capable of exposing a RESTConf interface for sensor and session management.
The YANG models supported by the gateway service are available on the following public github repository:
https://github.com/Accedian/skylight-yang

The two modes of operation are available:

1. Skylight gateway - used for our intent based service assurance use cases
2. NSO gateway - used primarily as a RESTConf to REST passthrough interface

More documentation in this area will be available in the future.

Sensor Management

The Skylight solution enables network performance visibility through hardware and software components called Sensors. In general, sensors generate:

1. Active performance data

   • By injecting packets into the network and measuring their performance. There are several sensors capable of generating a mix of active PM data - the choice of sensor will depend greatly on your needs and resources available.
   • Sensor: control- VM based solution, used to manage our plugable SFP computes sensors
   • Sensor: agents - containerized solution, used for lower scale specific test scenarios in container friendly environments like edge kubernetes nodes, CPE devices or some routers
   • Performance Elements - hardware solutions, used for scale or locations lacking available compute
   • Flex 100- hardware solution for 100G endpoint monitoring

2. Passive performance data

   • Packet analysis of network data flowing through our Skylight sensor: capture allows the recording of flow performance information

Sensor management services will be deployed on the Skylight in accordance to the sensors to be utilized in the solution.

Session Management

The Skylight solution is evolving towards a singular method to manage sessions across all of the sensors capable of generating active data. This will include common UI and API experiences. At this time, different underlying Skylight orchestration services are required to be deployed on the platform to expose sensor group specific interfaces. Namely,

1. Legacy Orchestrator for embedded sensor and session management
2. Sensor: agent session orchestration services

Data Streamer

To faciliate data export, Skylight offers a streaming interface where gNMI clients can subscribe for data on all or specific segments of active PM data being ingested by Skylight.

More documentation in this area will be available in the future.

Performance Analytics

Skylight performance analytics adds the ability to:

• retain historical performance data
• generate threshold alerts
• build custom dashboards
• leverage refined troubleshooting and deep analysis tools
• setup scheduled reports

For more informationation, check out Provider Connectivity Assurance documentation.