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.

It is required that your organization has set up the above mentioned Network Latency Pings. See Monitor Availability, Latency and Response Times with Application Ping for details about how to create and activate an application ping.

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.

If you want Ping-related information, select <name(ICMP))> that you want to show on you graph.
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.

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.

Lower latency = More responsive = Better experience

You can see the latency for dr (ICMP) has increased as the result in high Response time. Each series displays a snapshot of your network health at that particular point of time.

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.

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