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The software-based solution evaluates communication quality between applications in virtualized environments, providing visualization from field to cloud working with Anritsu’s Network Master Pro hardware
In sum — What to know
A virtual network test solution: Anritsu launched Virtual Network Master for AWS environments.
Monitoring KPIs: The solution evaluates key network performance indicators like latency, jitters, throughout, and packet loss rate.
Designed for virtual infrastructures: It is designed to bridge the visibility gap in virtual environments where physical test instruments cannot be deployed.
The enterprise network today is more complex than it has ever been. As companies have moved more workloads in the cloud, adopted virtualization as a way of managing resources, the communication layer has become more intricate — but consequently, less transparent.
“The growth of cloud-based web services has been of tremendous benefit to enterprise business operations,” Matt Brown, Business Development Manager at Anritsu said. “Cloud-based hosting services dramatically reduce CapEx, are instantly scalable, provide pay-as-you-go flexibility, and have global reach. However, moving the IT operations — applications, servers, and network — outside of the enterprise brings significant loss of visibility and control.”
Traditional network monitoring tools fail to provide granular visibility into this layered landscape, preventing teams from accurately anticipating application behavior. Analysts at Enterprise Management Associates found that only a minority (36%) of system admins actually believe that the network management tools they have are as good at managing cloud networks as they do on-prem networks.
Data suggests that over a third of the network traffic is outside network teams’ range of what is called “good visibility” — a massive disadvantage as the enterprise network is connected to its business applications via many elements, and good visibility into those parts is tied directly to delivering good-quality user application experience.
Anritsu released a software-based solution to get around this visibility gap in virtual and cloud environments. The Anritsu Virtual Network Master (vTester) for AWS (MX109030PC) measures and evaluates end-to-end (E2E) communication quality, helping operators have view of the network performance where traditional hardware cannot deploy.
Here’s how it work: Anritsu vTester deploys a virtual instance of its network performance testing suite onto the cloud server hosting the applications, and then sets measurement points on the communication paths within the environment.
“By remotely deploying Anritsu’s vTester directly onto the server, we eliminate the need for a person with a physical, hand-held test unit to connect at the server rack. Also, we get visibility into the application performance on the actual server being used,” told Brown.
This way, it constantly gathers and evaluates key metrics like throughput, latency, frame loss rate, and jitter through leased fiber, internet exchange providers (IXP), demarcation points and various transport technologies, unidirectionally.
“The path from the enterprise to the cloud may not be the same as the return from the cloud to the enterprise,” he said. “Measuring channel performance unidirectionally gives unique visibility into the root cause of network impairment.”
Active testing enables it to account for the differences in traffic loads between uplink and downlink in applications such as video transmission, by generating realistic traffic mimicking the actual application behavior.
One of the ways vTester stands out from open-source network performance measurement tools is that it supports one-way latency measurement. By synchronizing the clocks between the sender and receiver, it can record the latency time of each frame at one-second interval. As it records the maximum, minimum, and average values, the latency fluctuations get captured accurately. Anritsu says even latency peaks in the moment can be captured with high precision with this tool.
Anritsu says the best thing about vTester is that it brings Anritsu’s carrier-grade measurement capabilities to enterprise customers in cloud or hybrid public/private cloud.
The solution is currently aimed at two key use cases where high-precision measurement data delivers value: measuring communication quality between cloud severs to assist with switching decisions; and benchmarking cellular network latency to optimize reliability of mission-critical systems like autonomous vehicles.
vTester complements Anritsu’s test hardware line, Network Master Pro — MT1000A and MT1040A.
