Performance management company Nyansa added new data sources via applications to its user performance management platform Voyance. The additions enhance visibility to end points on the user access network — the client WiFi connection and the broadband WAN.

Palo Alto-based Nyansa is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) company that specifically focuses on network analytics and the user experience, which it defines as how users, devices, and applications perform across the entire network. Its primary platform, Voyance, is strictly a software solution that resides in Amazon Web Services (AWS). It is vendor-agnostic when it comes to the hardware its customers deploy in their networks.

According to David Callisch, Nyansa's vice president of marketing, Voyance was built using open source code and a bunch of new Web 2.0 tools in the big data arena. In order to determine 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.

With the most recent update, Voyance can analyze packet, wireless, client, and WAN data across the entire stack, “providing a single source of truth that goes across the entire network operations team,” according to Callisch.

In order to monitor this, customers deploy a single piece of software — that Nyansa calls Crawler — that sits in the customer's network off of a SPAN port in the wired network. The Nyansa software scans traffic to and from that Crawler, which ingests the different data sources and compares them.

Around 90 percent of Nyansa's customers use the public service. But the company also has a private offering for its larger customers that might be “public cloud averse,” said Callisch. This option packages its software into a box that can be placed on premises.

The first new addition to the platform is a WAN application that is hosted in the Voyance platform. It integrates NetFlow and cFlow data, and it has future support for jFlow and sFlow. It correlates the WAN data with everything else on the network to identify links, users, applications, etc. that are causing performance problems during peak utilization times.

“We’re looking at the WAN traffic flows on a minute-by-minute basis,” said Callisch. “So every minute, we’re correlating that data.”

The second new application is different in that it’s an application that goes on the actual client device. Callisch said that Nyansa wants to make its software as “frictionless as possible,” which meant that up until this update the platform and solution were agentless. However, this led to a blind spot between the client and the WiFi network. So it is releasing a client agent, a small piece of software that can be deployed on Mac OS X or Windows clients (support for Android will come in the future), and it sends that data to Voyance.

This enables IT Teams to perform tests to measure a variety of user experience metrics including throughput, latency, packet loss, and jitter. This client data is fed back into the Voyance platform and compared against all the other network data being collected.