Assurance Sensor Agents

Overview

Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance Sensor Agents (formerly Skylight sensor: agents) are containerized microservice test agents capable of performing active testing on layers 3-7. Fully integrated with Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance (formerly Skylight performance analytics), Agents can bring additional visibility and intelligence into service and network performance using a minimal footprint.

Each Agent is deployed as a single-service multiple-use function, that is, there is one dedicated Agent for each type of test, while each Agent possibly could have multiple concurrent or queued tests defined.

All Agents are intended to be "stateless" microservices. This means that no, or as little as possible configuration resides with the Agent, instead, it gets its orders from the orchestration services residing within Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance.

To communicate with the agent orchestration services, Agents leverage a gateway container referred to as the Sensor Collector (formerly Roadrunner). Both management commands as well as measurement metrics flow through the Sensor Collector service between the Agent and Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance. The orchestration services keep track of which Agents are connected, through which Sensor Collector, so that a command gets sent to the right Agent instance.

Agents have different characteristics depending on its type, but all Agents share the same set of initial setup parameters and many of the API configuration parameters are common between agents. The mode of operation can be different though depending on if the tests are more of the continous 24/7 type or more ad-hoc time-boxed functions.

Related Documentation and References

Agent installation guidelines