TCP Throughput Tests

About TCP Throughput Tests

In TCP throughput tests, a lot of traffic is pushed or retrieved over a specific path to measure network performance. Since TCP is a two-way protocol, you receive data from the destination to confirm that transmission was successful.

TCP throughput tests are typically not continuous and include:

• Start time
• Duration
• Set of results

Why TCP Throughput Tests Help

TCP connections can take multiple paths or be affected differently depending on other traffic using the bandwidth in a network. TCP throughput tests collect metrics both during and after testing.

A TCP test like the Skylight RFC6349 TCP throughput does however provide a reliable and automatable way to get results that are comparable between test runs. It is therefore a good practice to conduct and select "known good" tests for each test path as references, which could be used for comparison with later test runs to detect deviations.

Collected metrics are key for measuring the quality of an end-to-end network connection. TCP throughput tests can help you investigate and troubleshoot issues quicker before the deployment of applications and devices.

Managing Your Sessions

Before you start testing, verify that your throughput agent has the correct configuration. Proper configuration is required so that the agent can send throughput data to be properly ingested on the other side. Once your agent is set up, continue to the following section.

Once that Throughput test is run, it will be picked up by Skylight analytics and you will be able to see the session object on your Skylight analytics UI.

To view this data, log in to your Skylight analytics account and then follow the instructions in Accessing the TCP Throughput Details Screen.

Accessing the TCP Throughput Details

▶ To access the TCP Throughput details

1. Click Inventory in the left sidebar.
2. Click the Sessions tab, and then change Type from All to throughput.
   
3. Click a test object.
   

The throughput details page appears. From this page, you can choose between these tabs:

• Overview
• TCP Tests

The Overview tab has metadata editing options, and displays a summary of test run data and their metrics, as shown in this example:

The TCP Tests tab provides a similar view with an additional Select test runs button that opens a sidebar, which displays a list of test runs and their metrics.

Click the Select test runs button to open the sidebar and view the following information:

• Test date of your test runs
• Your throughput metric

From the sidebar, you can select a test and perform these tasks:

• Use the search bar to filter tests by date
• Check or uncheck the visibility of tests in the list
• Mark a test as a reference by clicking the star icon under Ref.

  Marking a test as a reference highlights its own reference line in the timeseries. Hover on the reference to view more details, as shown in this example:

When you mark a test as a reference, you will see the delta with other tests. This delta is shown in the sidebar table as a + or - percentage on the other tests.

The reference test's unmodified timeseries data appear as a dotted line to distinguish between the reference test and other tests.