Performance Troubleshooting

Identifying the Root Cause of Performance Degradations

Once a performance degradation has been isolated, and the first 4 of 5 Ws have been answered (i.e., what, when, where, who), it is time to focus on the question of why.

Skylight™ provides deep insights on to the root cause(s) of the performance degradation and the tasks or transactions that are impacted.

Performance Vision platform

Identifying the origin

Skylight quickly identifies the components that are degrading the end-user experience:

  • Client applications: generating disconnections, slowing down transfers, generating rogue traffic, etc.
  • Network devices: improper configuration (routing, prioritization), slow performance (degraded latency, packet loss), congestion
  • Servers: generating disconnections, slowing down transfers
  • Remote desktop/application access: VDI, Terminal Server and Citrix layers
  • Common network service performance, such as name resolution, authentication, etc.
  • Applications with excessive processing times or application errors

Establishing a baseline and correlating events with change logs

One of the biggest challenges when addressing intermittent faults is to identify what changed and when it changed.

To assist in solving sporadic performance degradations, Skylight retains a rich, detailed history of network and application behaviors in order to establish a baseline and a point of reference for the “normal” behavior of IT infrastructure and services. The establishment of a baseline applies to both network- and application-centric measurements, as well as to volumes or response time indicators.

Skylight’s network and application performance baselines help IT teams to pinpoint when the originating event took place so that they can correlate it with IT changelogs.

By comparing the evolution of current performance metrics to a baseline, the IT team can immediately narrow down its search to the specific one change—out of the many changes that often take place in a complex IT infrastructure (e.g., client-side upgrades, network device configuration changes, common services deployments, security policy updates, server configuration changes, or application upgrades).

Routing the case efficiently

IT departments often find it difficult to determine which member team should be working on the resolution of performance degradation events raised by end-users. As a result, in the most severe cases, while all IT teams are called upon to investigate the origin(s) of end-user experience degradation(s), there is a parallel effort to establish innocence. This is often how the fingerpointing starts.

Skylight acts as a single source of truth that all teams can agree on. This enables IT departments to instantly identify the origin of the response time degradations and to rapidly assign their resolution to the appropriate team, saving time and effort for all the overall IT team, and shortening resolution time (MTTR) for end-users.

Gathering and sharing evidence

Skylight provides immediate and profound insight into performance events. Using Skylight, IT professionals can immediately share incident reports with all stakeholders, comparing performance degradations with normal behavior and detailing the contributions of each element involved in application delivery (i.e., client, network, common services, server, application) as well as end-user response times.