Performance management company Nyansa took a page from social media platforms and added a social networking service to its Voyance network analytics platform. The service, which it named network friending, enables Nyansa customers to compare and contrast their own network performance against other customers with similar networks.

Prior to launching the network friending, Nyansa provided anonymized performance benchmarks to its customers. “Customers have found this capability immensely invaluable, but have continually asked us to reveal the companies provided in these comparisons so they can collaborate, ask questions with peers to better understand some of the practices being used,” said David Callisch, Nyansa VP of marketing.

The new network friending service enables them to benchmark against any performance metric that Voyance analyzes across the full network stack. This includes web performance, WiFi performance, application response times, client and device behavior, roaming times, and more.

The service is built directly into its Voyance platform. Customers must opt-in and can then send a friend request to any or all of the anonymized sites being compared. The resulting interactions are completely customer-initiated and run. Nyansa customers can also track the different aspects of their infrastructure performance against those of their “friends.” From there Callisch says “everything is actionable,” with the exception of infrastructure configuration management.

Voyance, is strictly a software solution that resides in Amazon Web Services (AWS), but it is vendor-agnostic when it comes to the hardware its customers deploy in their networks.

To determine if there are  problems in the network, Voyance analyzes each client transaction on the network, correlates them together, determines patterns and anomalies that have an impact on the network productivity, and suggests remediation. The platform already provides certain actionable recommendations for incidents. It then determines the amount of lost connectivity or the lost number of client hours that could be recovered by taking the recommendation.

The network friending service relies on “cloud sourcing” — which refers to Nyansa’s ability to combined detailed anonymized insights and analytics from different production network access environments. “It’s a form of collective intelligence wherein the more production data is on the platform, the more powerful the platform becomes.”