VSS Monitoring vCapacity microburst measurement capability

VSS Monitoring’s vCapacity is a high-performance real-time microburst measurement capability for its Distributed Traffic Capture Systems that provides sub-millisecond visibility into network performance. VSS is claimed to be the only traffic capture vendor providing both real-time packet-level visibility as well as bit-level metadata for monitoring and security tools.

vCapacity works by sampling one or multiple network links at millisecond intervals at speeds up to 10 GigE and recording link utilisation on a millisecond timescale. It measures traffic at the bit level and at full line rate, independent of switch SPAN ports, traditional taps and high-speed capture cards. This low-level view allows granular utilisation data to be gathered in real time and made available to latency and high-performance network analysers, without requiring separate taps and/or capture cards.

The product pinpoints transient and hard-to-measure problem spots the instant they occur. It can be used to detect the presence and location of microbursts (traffic spikes that can disrupt application performance), achieve lower latency, and provide historical data for accurate network utilisation reviews and planning.

The product records per-millisecond quanta, timestamps them at 1 s intervals and stores them for 1 min periods for retrieval by a network analyser or other tool. Each one-second record includes an average utilisation as well as the minimum and maximum millisecond quanta for that second. The timestamp can be used to correlate port data in order to detect unrecorded seconds and to discard unwanted seconds.

The product complements other features such as user-customisable filtering, ingress port timestamping, vSlice conditional packet slicing and session-aware load balancing, helping to ensure that each monitoring or security tool receives only the network traffic - whether location, type, and/or content - it needs to see.