Overview
Accedian is pleased to announce release 21.12 of Skylight sensor: agents.
What's New
21.12 is the second GA release of the Skylight sensor: agent and contains a number of new features and functions compared to the previous 21.06 release:
- New session types for actuate - UDP echo and ICMP echo
- Management API changes with new common structure for all agents
- Automated handling of throughput baseline test results in orchestration
- Performance Data Broker performance improvements
- Support for namespaces (VRF)
- Disk space size reduction of agent containers by 20-40%
- Reflectors in actuate now disabled by default to support multi-agent deployments on same host
- Demo agent for path tracing, with API and orchestration
Note: Given that configuration API has changed since the earlier release, all configurations must be recreated.
Release Components
| Component | Version | Note |
|---|---|---|
| agent throughput | skylight-agent-throughput-amd64_21.12_714 | |
| agent actuate | skylight-agent-actuate-amd64_21.12_714 | |
| agent trace | skylight-agent-trace-amd64_21.12_714 | Demo only |
| orchestration | 0.66.0 (component of Skylight analytics 21.12) | |
| roadrunner | 0.295.0 |
Agent Characteristics and Capabilities
| agent | capability | max use count | CPU max | RAM max | Disk typical | comment |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| actuate | RFC5357 TWAMP light | 50 | 0.15 core | 0.3GB | 0.2GB | 20pps each |
| actuate | RFC5357 TWAMP control | 50 | 0.15 core | 0.3GB | 0.2GB | 20pps each |
| actuate | RFC862 UDP Echo | 50 | 0.15 core | 0.3GB | 0.2GB | 20pps each |
| actuate | RFC792 ICMP Echo | 50 | 0.15 core | 0.3GB | 0.2GB | 20pps each |
| throughput | RFC6349 baseline | 1 | 1 core | 0.1GB | 0.2GB | cell |
| throughput | RFC6349 throughput | 1 | 1 core | 0.1GB | 0.2GB | 10Gbps max |
| trace | UDP/TCP/ICMP Paris/Dublin | demo only | 1 core | 0.1GB | 0.2GB | 1 destination |
| roadrunner data proxy | - | - | 4 cores | 8GB | 10GB | 2,500 concurrent sessions |
Upgrade Paths
Skylight sensor: agents use a destroy-redeploy model common for container applications. This means that an agent is never upgraded, it is simply replaced. In order to support this mode of operation, only the absolute minimum of configuration parameters are stored with the agent, the rest being kept in the orchestration system and downloaded to the agent at startup. The agent 21.12 is backwards compatible with the docker-compose configuration of 21.06, which means the agent can be updated by changing the release version in the docker compose file. Note that the session/test configuration has changed which requires redefinition of any active sessions before or after upgrade.
Deployment Considerations
The sensor: agents deploy as containers on x86 environments. Thus, a container environment is required and we recommend docker 20.10.0 or later.
Corrected Issues
| ID | description | workaround |
|---|---|---|
| SA-412 | Session name of 64 characters not supported | Use max 63 unicode characters |
Known Issues
| ID | description | workaround |
|---|---|---|
| SA-327 | RFC6349 baseline MTU detection may fail on lossy networks | Define MTU statically in throughput test configuration |
| SA-306 | Payload size for IPv6 TWAMP can be set to larger values than the MTU | Do not use larger IPv6 payload size than 1452b |
| SA-509 | TWAMP-CP: When control session is down, data is not accepted into analytics | Make sure the (3rd party) TWAMP responder is up |
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