Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance Sensors Data Sheet

 

Cisco^® Provider Connectivity Assurance Sensors (formerly Accedian Skylight Sensors) form a physical or virtual instrumentation layer for Provider Connectivity Assurance, a proactive service assurance solution that provides granular, real-time, and service-centric visibility to communications service providers, enterprises, and public sector organizations, enabling them to monitor and assure their owned or leased network infrastructure, services, and connectivity.

Product overview

Provider Connectivity Assurance Sensors are used to gain granular and precise insights into network connectivity and performance by either injecting synthetic test traffic (active testing) or sampling existing traffic (passive testing). Depending on the sensor type, services ranging from Layer 2 to Layer 7 can be monitored 24/7/365 to prove compliance with Service-Level Agreements (SLAs) or to detect deviations from baseline results. The sensors feed Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to the Provider Connectivity Assurance analytics engine, which scales to billions of KPIs per day.

To instrument various types of networks, the Provider Connectivity Assurance Sensors come in different form factors, both software and hardware. This data sheet describes the software-based sensor options:

●     Sensor Agents: Containerized (Cloud-native Network Function [CNF]) test agents are lightweight, software-based active test points. Agents include Actuate, Throughput, Trace, and Transfer.

●     Sensor Control: Virtual machine (Virtual Network Function [VNF]) high-performance test system for large-scale, software-based active testing.

●     Sensor Capture: Virtual machine (VNF) high-performance test systems for large-scale, software-based passive traffic and application monitoring.

●     Sensor SFPs and Modules: Physical (Physical Network Function [PNF]) high-accuracy and wire-speed pluggable test points for large-scale and high-bandwidth tests, used to physically distribute test points for the Capture software sensor.

Any combination of sensors can be used, depending on the use case, network topology, and scaling requirements of the user. For automated provisioning, test functions are available via APIs and can be integrated into an existing workflow system or with the Cisco Crosswork^® Network Automation platform (Cisco Crosswork Network Controller and Network Services Orchestrator (NSO)).

Pluggable hardware sensor options can serve as an optional physical instrumentation layer for the Sensor Control software. The hardware sensors leveraging the Sensor Control software are the Assurance Sensor SFPs and Sensor Modules. More information about these sensors can be found in their respective data sheets.

Features and benefits

Table 1.           Features and benefits of Provider Connectivity Assurance Sensors: Agents, Capture, Control

Prominent feature

Assured connectivity, everywhere

Instrumenting the “point of interest” is vital for accurate network and service assurance. The sensors should be deployed at the precise location and layer, physically or virtually, where the visibility is desired, and the back-end metrics collection and analytics can scale with the size of the deployment to maintain real-time dashboards and alerting functions.

The Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance platform is built to scale, providing multiple options for sensor deployment, and can be fully automated and integrated with Cisco or third-party workflow engines.

Flexible deployment options:

●     Pure software sensors for x86/ARM architectures supporting automated deployment with Docker tools or Kubernetes Helm charts

●     Software (VM) plus Network Interface Card (NIC) hardware assist for high-accuracy timestamping

●     Horizontally scalable for large hub-and-spoke and mesh-type assurance scenarios

●     Option to use pluggable hardware (Assurance Sensor SFPs or Sensor Modules) to instrument existing infrastructure, either in-line with the service or out-of-line on a spare port

●     Option to use larger form-factor hardware sensors

Real-time visibility:

●     Users can create custom dashboards with custom widgets for the presentation of real-time service performance insights and reporting.

●     Leverage Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) to help ensure that the right user groups see the data they are supposed to see.

Platform support

Table 2.           Assurance Sensor deployment support and high-level feature set

Licensing

Software sensors do not require any licenses. The sensors are included in the following Provider Connectivity Assurance platform RTU licenses.

Table 3.           Provider Connectivity Assurance platform licenses

In addition to the RTU, licenses are needed per test session.

Table 4.           Provider Connectivity Assurance test session and flow licenses

Product specifications

Table 5.           Assurance Sensor characteristics and capabilities

Key active performance test types using Provider Connectivity Assurance Sensors

Using the Assurance Sensors, the Provider Connectivity Assurance platform provides the following measurements and testing capability including:

●     TWAMP: Two-Way Active Measurement Protocol

●     ETH-DM: Ethernet Delay Measurement

●     ETH-LB: Ethernet Loop Back

●     ICMP Echo: Internet Control Message Protocol Echo

●     UDP Echo: User Datagram Protocol Echo

●     ETH-VS: Ethernet Vendor Specific

●     TCP throughput (RFC 6349)

●     Traceroute

KPIs include:

1.     Continuous SLA-type monitoring (Sensor Agent Actuate and Sensor Control)

One-way delay, PDV, and IPDV (jitter)

●     Min/max/average

●     Median (p50)

●     Percentile 25/75/95/96/98/99

●     Standard deviation

One-way packet statistics

●     Packets lost (number and %)

●     Loss bursts min / max

●     Reordered packets (number and %)

●     Packets duplicated (number and %)

One-way packet field and QoS metrics

●     IP TOS max (DSCP diffserv)

●     IP TOS min

●     TTL max/min

●     MOS / R-value

2.     Continuous passive application monitoring (Sensor Capture)

Protocol layers parsed

●     arp

●     bootp

●     cifs

●     citrix

●     citrix_channels

●     databases

●     dce_rpc

●     dhcp

●     dns

●     email

●     ftp

●     http / http2

●     icmp

●     ipsec

●     kerberos

●     ldap

●     non-ip

●     other-ip

●     rdp

●     smb

●     socks5

●     sql

●     ssh

●     tcp

●     tls

●     udp

●     vnc

●     voip

Applications recognized and categorized for performance and bandwidth analysis

●     5000+ common SaaS applications (cloud services)

●     Custom application definition filters

3.     Scheduled or one-shot active test KPIs (Sensor Agents Transfer, Throughput, and Trace)

●     DNS lookup time

●     HTTP(s) / FTP / TCP service response time

●     Asset download time

●     TCP throughput uplink / downlink

●     TCP window size variation

●     Path RTT (during TCP test)

●     Traceroute hop IP, DNS name

●     Traceroute hop count, path change

See more in Technical Documentation.

System requirements

Table 6.           Sensor Agent minimum requirements

The above are minimum requirements; see the release notes for the Sensor Agents for different scaling options.

Table 7.           Sensor Capture minimum requirements

The above are minimum requirements; see the release notes for Sensor Capture for different scaling options.

Table 8.           Sensor Control minimum requirements

Above are minimum requirements, see release notes for Sensor Control for different scaling options.

Ordering information

To order the Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance platform, please visit the Cisco Ordering homepage.

All software Assurance Sensors are included in the platform RTU licenses.

Table 9.           Provider Connectivity Assurance platform licenses

Warranty information

Technical support plus software updates are included with subscription software.

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For more information

Do you have blind spots in your observability? Do you have critical applications and services you are managing and prefer a more proactive approach to management rather than a reactive one? The Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance platform offers a range of Assurance Sensor options that can meet your needs, providing granular visibility and monitoring that will enhance your approach to assuring digital experiences. For additional information, visit cisco.com.