Formerly known as Network Latency Widget

The Latency Chart Widget graphically shows network latency measured by PING and Traceroute measurements.
This widget shows the measurements of the amount of time it takes for a network packet of data to travel from a given starting point (a computer that has the PerformanceGuard agent installed) to a specific destination.
What is Network Latency?   Network latency is the term used to indicate the delay that happens in data communication over a network. Network latency is typically measured in milliseconds and the measured value tells how long it takes a packet to reach its destination and return to the sender. This is also known as Round-Trip-Time or RTT. Network connections in which small delays occur are called low-latency networks whereas network connections which suffers from long delays are called high-latency networks.
The Network Latency Widget supports two types of network latency measurements:

• PING: uses the ICMP echo request known from the ping command line utility. If you specify a hostname, the agent will look up the IP address first. Then the agent will send a single ICMP echo request to the specified server. If it receives a response within 5 seconds, the status for the request will be available. The exact time that has passed from the echo request was sent until the response was received is the response time.
• Traceroute: detects and captures the paths that data packets travel from a given starting point (a computer that has the PerformanceGuard agent installed) to a specific destination. While PerformanceGuard detects the route, it will also record the network latency between different routers along the route to the final destination.

Set up the Widget

You can only do this if you're a PerformanceGuard administrator.
Before you setup the widget, you need to find out if application pings have been set up and activated in the required agent configuration group. It is also your administrator who defines what you are able to monitor with the Widget.
You simply add the widget to the dashboard and configure the required information in the widget setup dialog's menus.
When you set up the widget, decide whether it should display only Ping-related information, Traceroute information or both.

1. If you want Ping-related information, select <name(ICMP))> that you want to show on you graph.
2. If you want Traceroute information, select <name(TRACE)> from Network Latency pings.

You can select multiple computers and locations to view the Network Latency across computers and locations.
When you use the Locations menu, there's a search field that you can use to search for locations.

Show Application Details

The widget by default shows one graph per application. However, one application may run on several different servers, so it can be useful to see if all of those servers perform equally well.
To see this, click the widget's icon. This will split single application graphs into one graph per server that runs the application, including servers for which there's no data in the selected time period.
For web activities, it will split the single graphs into one graph per web activity element that PerformanceGuard measures.
Example: If your administrator has set up PerformanceGuard to measure each image on a web page, you will see a graph for each image if you click the icon.

Connect All Samples

The samples in the graph will by default be Automatic . If you don't want this you can select Connect All or set them to Disconnect All .

Resolution

To sort the large data-sets and view them more clearly in the graph, click the widget's resolution icon.
You can use resolution when you have a large number of individual graphic elements that you can not distinguish between them. It is very similar to the idea of putting data into categories / class as it divides the data values into a set of disjoint intervals called Bins. It will allow you to group individual data values into one instance of graphic element.
You can select from the lowest time interval such as (1 min) to the highest interval such as (1 week, 1 month).
Example: You can see a significant difference in display of data values from 04:00 to 08:00 when resolution is selected at the intervals of 30 min, 1 hour and 4 hours allowing you to visualize data in ways that are meaningful. Click thumbnail to view image in full size.

The data values which fall in to those selected respective intervals, a bin, are replaced by a value representative of that interval. The data outside of the [start, end] range is discarded and thus will not be displayed on the graph.

Toggle Minimum and Maximum Values Off and On

The widget by default shows average, minimum and maximum values. To toggle the minimum and maximum values off and on, click the widget's icon.
When you view minimum and maximum values, you can reveal otherwise hidden peaks in resource usage.
The difference can be dramatic. Look at this example: When we view average values, the highest average value is 18, but when we view the minimum and maximum values, the maximum value for the same period turns out to be 79.

How can the maximum value be much higher than the average? PerformanceGuard has typically sampled data many times between the data points in the graph. The maximum value is the highest value that PerformanceGuard has recorded when it sampled data in the interval between the points on the graph, but the maximum value may not have occurred very often, and therefore it may not contribute very much to the average value. The same principle applies to minimum values.

Adjust Vertical Axis (Y-Axis)

To adjust the vertical axis of a graph, click the widget's icon. If the graph has multiple vertical axes, you can adjust each axis separately.
When you adjust an axis, bear in mind that you won't be able to see data points that are outside the range that you specify.

STATISTICS

When you view the graph, you can also see a Statistics table by switching to Statistics mode . Statistics icon will not be visible if there is no data available.
Note that the Statistics table shows the weighted average for the graph's samples. That means that each value to be averaged is assigned a weight based on the number of occurrences of that value.

Zoom

To zoom in, click and drag across the required area of the timeline.

Analyze the Network Latency Graph

When you hover over a point on the graph you will see the properties and results in latency. If the latency spikes at regular intervals or follow a particular pattern, this may indicate performance problems on Backend web application servers or application dependency servers due to overhead incurred when running scheduled tasks.

The graph allows you to compare the actual measured values under different packet loss scenarios and can get alerted to issues before users notice them.
Some network issues are transient in nature and would be hard to catch only by looking at the current state of the network. This is because issues can surface quickly and disappear before anyone notices, only to reappear at a later point in time. Such transient issues can also be difficult for application administrators because those issues often surface as unexplained increases in application response time, even when all application components appear to run smoothly.
You can easily detect those kinds of issues by looking at your Latency Chart Widget graph where the issue will appear as a sudden spike in network latency or packet loss.