Glossary
Last updated
Was this helpful?
Last updated
Was this helpful?
After a device is fully deployed and tested, 'activate' makes the device live for monitoring on Highlight, previously referred to as 'promote'.
A server running Highlight software that provides a framework for managing Highlight tasks such as device polling, flow collection and performance testing. Results are compiled and sent back to the main Highlight system for presentation and archiving. Devices monitored by Highlight do not use agent software.
An application domain comprises a folder and all its subfolders. All users in those folders see the same AppVis groups. Typically an application domain is set at the top folder for an entire customer organisation.
Sent via email or SNMP trap to make someone aware of issues on the network. Alternatively, use a webhook to integrate into service management systems.
These are referred to as level 3 metrics in Highlight. See also:
Stability: a measure of outages and availability issues (availability is measured over time, as a percentage and stability relates to whether an element is up or down)
Load: a measure of traffic utilisation on a circuit or other device
Health: a measure of performance problems, packet discards, line errors and signal problems (WiFi only)
Like a pipe to transport data - the pipe can be partitioned to fast and slow sections, can be up or down and can be heavily or lightly loaded.
The time periods (to the nearest hour) that a business is operational, say Monday – Friday 9am to 5pm; used when displaying traffic trend graphics, for filtering report results, and when generating alerts.
A server which has the function of receiving data being sent by monitored devices e.g. Flow.
Pop-ups marked with '?' which provide information relevant to the selected area of Highlight and possibly a link to detailed documentation.
Highlight will check and update the bandwidth as part of the 'Device Validation' process for a router, which happens each time a router configuration change is detected, or every 24-48 hours if not.
An auto-discovered interface, either defined as part of a switch port channel, or as a circuit bonded with others to form a faster logical interface across the WAN.
The left panel on the Highlight UI which shows the structure of folders, often referred to as the tree.
A stand-alone network test associated by Highlight with a bearer or a child watch (class of service or VLAN, for example). The actual test source can be any Highlight reachable device capable of running tests.
A server with access to a customer's network that validates monitored devices and performs the gathering of statistics via SNMP.
As used in Precision Delay testing, a probe is one of a rapid sequence of packets whose transmission times are measured to establish accurate jitter and delay statistics.
An optional text field which is limited to 20 characters and enables service providers to display the service name for a watch rather than the Highlight default name, for example FTTC instead of ADSL.
A test to confirm the configured IP address with security credentials provided is reachable and responsive, used in Admin Pending, when adding a Performance Test, with Application Visibility and when editing a watch to change interface.
Found in Reporting and Details pages, use to select a given period: any day, week, or month for the past year. Also referred to as the Calendar control.
The visibility setting is applicable to bearer watches, service tiles, folders and alerts and is only shown if you are a service provider administrator. Visibility determines if a service tile, folder or alert will be visible to all users and customers or just to service provider internal staff. There are two options:
Customer:
anyone can see the item (this is the default setting)
Internal:
the item is only visible internally (for the service provider)
In the upper right corner of a location or service tile; shows the number of issues associated with the tile; coloured amber or red according to the severity of the issues.
An individual monitoring task that Highlight carries out to collect a specific set of information from a given device at regular intervals. For example, a bearer watch collects traffic, status and health information for a specific circuit or LAN interface, typically every three minutes. Other watch types include switch, host, VLAN, tunnel, Wireless controller, etc. You will also see references to ‘subwatches’ which are usually items associated with, or discovered beneath, a main watch – for example a class of service which is part of a bearer, or a Wireless Access Point (WAP) discovered on a controller:
bearers, Wireless Controller
switches
performance tests
CoS/VLAN/MLE
WAPs
a data communications technology that enables data transmission over copper telephone lines by using frequencies that are not used by a voice telephone call.
an organisation which defines various standards; those standards are referred to as ANSI-standard formats.
a set of clearly defined methods of communication between various software components.
A Cisco firewall and network security platform
data is transmitted in cells of a small, fixed size
a Cisco feature to maximise application performance on a network
data transfer rate (speed) of a network link, usually measured in bits per second (bps) or multiples:
Gbps/Gbs: gigabits per second, Highlight expresses this as 1000 megabits per second
Mbps/Mbs: megabits per second, Highlight expresses this as 1000 kilobits per second
kbps/kbs: kilobits per second, Highlight expresses this as 1000 bits per second
a relatively high amount of data sent or received over a short period
website information stored on your computer so web pages will load faster
static information (on a web page) that does not change very often as opposed to non-cacheable content - dynamic information that changes regularly or for each user request and serves no purpose if it were cached
Channel Utilisation indicates the percentage of time that a wireless access point (WAP) considers a channel to be busy with both user traffic and generic broadcast wireless traffic
Cisco Systems, based in California, produces networking equipment
a category of network traffic, used as part of a policy; example: Real_Time (used for voice and video so highest priority)
software on a computer that relies on sending a request to a computer server as part of the application
a device or program capable of encoding or decoding a digital data stream
small piece of information stored on your computer by your browser to customise what you see on a web page
typically the router or edge device connecting to a Service Provider network
the “brains” of a computer or other networking device, also called the processor
an error-detecting code commonly used in digital networks to detect any changes in received data
related to the processing and queuing times of a device, and also the effect of packet loss on an application requiring retransmissions
translates domain names into numerical IP addresses - the Internet's primary directory service
an advanced method of packet filtering which makes it possible to locate, identify, classify, reroute or block packets with specific data that normal packet filtering (which examines only packet headers) cannot detect, DPI is useful when identifying port hopping applications such as Skype
a family of technologies that are used to provide data network access by transmitting digital data over telephone lines
a single packet exchange between two devices typically used to establish round trip time
converting data into a form that can be transmitted without others being able to read the data; data is decrypted (using a password or key) by the receiving device
a sequence of packets from a source computer to a destination. Highlight Flow reports on the top 20 flows by volume for a given time period, using IP address and port numbers
IPFIX: IP Flow Information Export - an industry standard for sending Flow information
NetFlow: Cisco version of Flow
J-Flow: Juniper proprietary version of Flow using packet sampling
the unique combination of a hostname and a parent domain name e.g. www.highlight.net is the FQDN, where www is the host and highlight.net is the domain name
the part of software with which the user interacts – buttons, menus, toolbars, etc. Also UI: User Interface
uses a cryptographic key (like a password) with a hash function to provide data integrity and authentication. (hashing turns a string of characters into a shorter fixed-length value or key that represents the original string)
a Cisco protocol that provides default gateway redundancy in the event of failure
a standard used to create web pages adding graphic and hyperlink effects and involving tagging of text indicate font and colour
a standard set of rules used by IP for message control and error reporting
a physical or virtual network connection point on a device, generally defined by a name and network address, plus hardware address (if physical)
the method by which data is sent from one computer to another on the Internet
an organisation that provides access to or through the Internet and may also provide other network services such as domain name registration
variation in the time between packets arriving, caused by network congestion, timing drift, or route changes (important in digital voice transmission and other real-time applications)
Juniper Networks, based in California, produces networking equipment
A protocol for the bundling multiple physical ports that can be then be treated as a single channel for network traffic purposes.
a measure of the round trip time to send a packet and confirm its receipt
a measure of traffic compared with the connection speed
a unique identifier usually assigned by the hardware vendor to network interfaces for communications on the physical network segment. This is unlike an IP address, which is assigned using policy set by the administrator of the network a device is connected to.
a system in telecommunications networks that passes data from one network node to the next based on short path labels avoiding complex lookups in a routing table
a contract between two parties that permits confidential access to a set of information
A circuit board installed in a computer to provide network connectivity
A method to provide clock (time) synchronisation between computer systems over data networks
consists of eight bits of digital information and is broadly equivalent to a byte
A simple network echo packet
a system for passing electrical power over Ethernet cabling to a connected device with no other power source
a process for limiting the throughput of traffic
a series of actions that you want applied to traffic sent or received, using classes (class-maps) to categorise the traffic of interest
a way of preventing mistakes or defects in products and avoiding problems when delivering solutions or services to customers
the ability in a network to provide different priority, or to guarantee a certain level of performance, to different applications [Simplistic Analogy: a main road with tolls, both barrier and without. Traffic through the non-barrier channel is unrestricted whereas the barriered channels can limit traffic according to road conditions ahead.]
typically connected to at least two networks and decides which way to send each packet based on its learned or configured understanding of the whole network
a set of rules that is used to determine the next hop for data packets traveling over a network
a way of delivering centrally hosted service applications, typically over the Internet
a traffic management technique which can queue traffic to comply with a desired traffic profile, used to optimise link performance by prioritising some traffic types
terms agreed between companies on what will be delivered, typically on service availability or performance
an Internet standard for email transmission
Signal-to-noise ratio is a measure that compares the level of a desired signal to the level of background noise. It is defined as the ratio of signal power to the noise power, often expressed in decibels.
millisecond (=1/1000 second, msec or ms), microsecond (=1/1000000 second, µsec/µs)
data being carried by the network or through a particular interface
an IP protocol used at the transport layer which provides simple transmission with no delivery guarantee
the address of a specific website or file on the Internet which uses forward slashes for different directories and does not contain spaces nor certain other characters
the time standard commonly used across the world, usually the same time as GMT
has its own operating system but shares resources, running under a control system which allocates resources and offers power and console management
data held on a server or transferred across a network link, usually measured in bytes (B) or multiples:
TB: terabyte, Highlight expresses this as 1024 gigabytes
GB: gigabytes, Highlight expresses this as 1024 megabytes
MB: megabytes, Highlight expresses this as 1024 kilobytes
kB: kilobytes, Highlight expresses this as 1024 bytes
A way for an App to provide real-time information to other applications. Highlight has an option to pass alert information to service management systems utilising webhook technology.
Part of a , coloured amber or red and showing issues are improving (pointing down) or deteriorating (pointing up) as trends (performance over time).
A flexible, customised grouping of watches which can be put into one-off or recurring maintenance, displayed as a service tile or used as the basis of a report. Related terms: ,
A folder in Highlight, and its subfolders, which is associated with a specific login URL. All user accounts in a domain have to be unique but duplicate user accounts can be configured on several domains, allowing access to disparate parts of the Highlight tree. Similar term:
Bearer watches can be set as dormant in the or in the . Dormant interfaces only send stability alerts if the device is uncontactable or Highlight has detected that the underlying connectivity service is unavailable.
Seen in Highlight's historical reporting. When any metric Highlight is monitoring (for example Load or Response Time) exceeds its target threshold for a certain length of time, it generates an Exception and causes the watch and its associated location tile to change colour (green to amber and then red). The watch now stays in this ‘Exception’ state until the metric returns to normal. The counts the total number of times this watch went into an Exception state and the total time it spent in that state in hours and minutes. See also:
Custom defined, frequent use elements in Highlight. See also:
Term used in reference to the in Highlight, a parent folder containing subfolders and
Coloured green, amber or red to show if performance is within or exceeding thresholds used for locations and services. See also:
An Issue Score is a number from 0 (good, no issues) to 10 (bad, lots of issues) which provides a simple way to see how good or bad a location was during the selected time period and to compare it with other locations. Issue Scores are an aggregation of several metrics. Values are adjusted logarithmically so that small-medium problems push the score up quickly, and it then levels off. See also:
Relates to the current up/down state of a watch when monitoring Link Health, WAPs or Performance tests. Affects the Stability metric of the heat tile. Related term: See also:
Relates to changes in the state of a device between samples when monitoring Link Health. Affects the Stability metric of the heat tile. Related term: See also:
A point in the in Highlight which contains reports and tests.
Watches in maintenance do not send alerts, change the colour of heat tiles nor decrement availability figures. Related terms: ,
The interval between consecutive SNMP requests from Highlight for information from a watch. Typically every 3 minutes but can vary by partner. This is shown as Poll Frequency on the and as Poll (secs) in the
The Reporting API makes it possible to view Highlight’s summarised data, device inventory and watch folder/location information outside the Highlight Service Observability Platform. Read more about the .
See watch. Also known as 'child watches,' these are discovered watches such as Classes of Service, VLANs and WAPs or created watches such as performance tests. These are typically displayed in Highlight with the parent bearer. Related term:
See also: and
View our to see the full picture of how watches are used in Highlight.
Related terms: , ,
The protocol (with several iterations) defined by the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers for communicating on Wireless Networks. Its purpose is to standardise methods of communication and ensure vendor interoperability. Related term:
the ninety-fifth percentile load value for a line, meaning the busiest that the line gets in normal usage, excluding those occasional peaks which might distort the reading. See also:
one option for the Encryption used by SNMPv3, using a 128-bit key length. Related term:
See:
a Cisco feature Related terms: ,
a router at the customer premises that is connected to the service provider MPLS network Related terms: ,
two devices communicating, used in Flow Related term:
the facility in an Ethernet packet to mark a priority from 0-7 which may be used by QoS to determine how traffic should be treated Related terms: ,
a tabular file format whereby each line represents a file record, and the fields associated with that record are separated by a comma Related terms: ,
Another term for a packet in IP networks, contains a segment of data and the destination address, enables data to be sent in small sections and reassembled at the destination Related term:
a widely-used method of data encryption using a 56-bit key length. 3-DES (triple DES) applies the encyption three times for each data block and is Highlight's default option for SNMPv3 encryption. Related term:
a document/XML file format which allows graphics, column re-sizing and custom logos to be inserted in downloaded Highlight reports and is not generally used for further analysis or data manipulation Related terms: ,
a field in an IP packet that enables different levels of service to be assigned to network traffic - achieved by marking each packet on the network with a DSCP code and appropriating to it the corresponding level of service Related term:
the outbound direction on a device interface Related term:
a family of computer networking technologies mainly used for local area networks Related term:
a block of data that is transmitted across a datalink such as Ethernet Related term:
a device to interconnect networks that use different protocols e.g. an IP network to a public telephone network Related term:
part of the SNMP MIB tree, headed by OID .1.3.6.1.2.1.25 Related terms: , ,
the set of rules for transferring data over the Internet; entering a URL into a browser sends an HTTP request to the appropriate Web server which in turn sends the requested HTML page Related terms: ,
a wide-area network which is built from a combination of two Internet Protocol technologies, usually a private MPLS network, and an IPsec VPN running over the public Internet Related terms: , , , ,
the inbound direction on a device interface Related term:
operating software running on Cisco equipment Related term:
a numerical reference used to address a device on a network such as 136.129.4.108 Related term:
a Cisco application which enables a router to measure metrics such as round-trip delays and unanswered echo requests Related terms: ,
a Cisco router feature typically found in Hybrid WAN environments. IWAN routers make intelligent routing decisions by weighing jitter, loss and delay measurements against application requirements like priority or delay sensitivity Related terms: , ,
a computer network that interconnects devices within a limited area such as an office block, using standards such as Ethernet and WiFi, typically the boundary (domain) of a network broadcast Related term:
the default option for the Authentication Protocol for SNMPv3 Related term:
a formal description of a set of network objects that can be managed using SNMP Related term:
a measure of the perceived audio quality of a telephone connection, scored from 1.0 (poor) to 5.0 (excellent) influenced by delay, loss and jitter Related terms: , ,
The process of mapping a source or destination IP address in a packet to another IP address Related term:
mechanism used by Cisco devices to recognise applications, packets are inspected using DPI Related terms: ,
used in SNMP to reference a setting using a numerical tree structure Related term:
also called a datagram in IP networks, contains a segment of data and the destination address, enables data to be sent in small sections and reassembled at the destination Related term:
the failure of one or more transmitted packets to arrive at their destination Related term:
can be the result of network queues becoming full, or packets which arrive but too late for processing, or duplicate packets Related term:
this is another term for
a router on a service provider MPLS network that is connected to other provider networks or a customer edge router Related terms: ,
a Juniper service similar to Cisco IPSLA Related term:
for cellular connections, a measurement of the power present in a received radio signal. Range is -30 to -120 dBm. Readings closer to zero are a stronger signal. Related terms:
for cellular connections, a measure of signal level and quality for modern 4G and 5G networks. RSRP is a more precise and accurate metric than RSSI. Range is -44 to -140 dBm. Readings closer to zero are a stronger signal. Related terms:
a document file format which has formatting applied and is not generally used for further analysis or data manipulation Related terms: ,
the overall time for a ping or echo to reach a device and receive a response, helpful to determine if there are any delay or latency problems on the network Related terms: ,
a network using centralised control of application routing to improve user experience Related term:
typically a more powerful computer with greater storage capability which runs applications accessed from client computers Related term:
one option for the Authentication Protocol for SNMPv3 Related term:
a standard method for managing devices on IP networks, using storage that can be that can be read and/or written to by the management system; there are three versions with improving security features: V1, V2c and V3 Related terms: ,
- Data Encryption Algorithm encryption protocol
- Advanced Encryption Standard encryption protocol
- Secure Hash Algorithm-1 authentication protocol
- Message Digest algorithm 5 authentication protocol
an unsolicited message to a server (trap receiver) usually indicating a significant event has occurred Note: Highlight does not operate as a trap receiver Related term:
The name given to a wireless network. A 32 character unique identifier for the WLAN. Usually this is also the name of the network which is visible to those who connect to it. Related term:
an IP protocol used at the transport layer which provides reliable transmission and adapts to network changes such as congestion. Related term:
the standardised set of communication protocols used over the Internet. Related term:
the facility in an IP packet to differentiate services carried, used by QoS schemes Related terms: ,
a virtual link which provides a network service not supported by the carrying network e.g. the ability to carry non-IP traffic over an IP network Related term:
a LAN that is partitioned into separate broadcast domains is then comprised of multiple virtual LANs Related term:
a group of technologies to provide voice services over IP Related term:
encrypts the original source and destination addressing as well as the application data before passing it across a public network (to create a network that appears private) Related term:
included in IP network routers and allows multiple instances of a routing table to exist in a router and work simultaneously. With VRF, network paths can be segmented without using multiple devices which increases network security and can eliminate the need for encryption and authentication. ISPs often take advantage of VRF to create separate virtual private networks (VPNs) for customers; thus the technology is also referred to as VPN routing and forwarding. Related terms: , ,
typically a telecommunications network that links LANs across a wide geographical area Related term:
Often referred to as an Access Point, a device that transmits and receives wireless signals. A WAP acts as the first layer of control for devices connecting to a common WLAN and allows for communication between WLANs and wired LANs. Related terms: , ,
WAPs connect to this device and it acts a centralised location for co-ordinating and controlling large numbers of WAPs and Wireless devices. It maintains a central configuration, security policy and software image for a group of WAPs. Wireless LAN Controller (WLC) is used by Cisco, Wireless Network Controller (WNC) by Aruba. Related term:
Wireless Local Area Network, a network made up of stations and access points used to connect devices without the use of wires. For the purposes of this glossary it refers to wireless networks using the IEEE 802.11 protocol Related terms:,
WLC is used by Cisco, WNC by Aruba. Related term: