Glossary

This article contains definitions of key terminology used throughout Exoprise.

Bandwidth

The rate of data transfer, bit rate, or throughput, typically measured in bits per second (bits/s) or a derivative of bits per second. Often used interchangeably as available bandwidth and consumed bandwidth.

Dashboard

Dashboards within the Exoprise console are composed of different tabs. There are two primary dashboards: Personal and Shared.

DNS

DNS is the system in which user-friendly names like www.exoprise.com are translated into IP addresses.

DOM loaded time

The time between the initial request and the point when the response has been parsed and the DOM loaded. This time includes the network time from the user's perspective to retrieve the contents of the web page, execute synchronous scripts, and start the retrieval of other page parts. Slower DOM loaded times are usually the result of slower networks, servers, and can sometime be related to a slower computer on the parsing side.

ExpressRoute

ExpressRoute is an Azure service that lets you create private connections between Microsoft data centers and infrastructure that's on your premises or in a colocation facility. ExpressRoute connections are available in bandwidths including 50 Mbps, 100 Mbps, 200 Mbps, 500 Mbps, 1 Gbps, 2 Gbps, 5 Gbps, and 10 Gbps.

Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP)

ICMP is a supporting protocol in the Internet Protocol Suite. It is used by network devices, including routers, to send error messages and operational information indicating, for example, that a requested service is not available or that a host or router could not be reached. Internet tracing to measure hop-by-hop speed leverages ICMP packets for return path notifications.

Jitter

In telecommunications, jitter is a measure of the variance of something when presumably it should be a regular, periodic entity. For example, in audio or video conversations, the delivery should be a regular stream of packets, but the jitter measures how irregular the packets are, which can have an effect on the quality of the audio/video conversation.

Management Client

The Management Client is our network client. You use it primarily for deploying Private Sites, and setting up (validating and deploying) private sensors. The Management Client is not required for viewing the data and interacting with Exoprise servers. In fact, we don't even recommend it, and we have a menu item that says Open in default browser to get you back to your preferred browsing environment.

Mean Opinion Score (MOS)

Mean Opinion Score is a metric used to quantify Quality of Experience with respect to telecommunications. It is often computed as the mean of values on a predefined scale between 1 and 5, with 1 being a poor experience and 5 being an excellent experience.

Message Transfer Agent (MTA)

Message Transfer Agent or Mail Transfer Agent is the mail relay server and software that is responsible for transferring email messages from one computer to another. Within the Exoprise system, we refer to mail flow performance as MTA statistics.

Network latency

Network latency refers to any kind of delay that happens in data communication over a network. Network connections in which small delays occur are called low-latency networks, whereas network connections which suffer from long delays are called high-latency networks. Generally, when it comes to comparing and understanding latency, anything under 100 ms is good and usually acceptable for most network workloads such as HTTP. Over 100 ms, latency starts to impact more network sensitive protocols and applications such as Microsoft Teams.

Test Your Network Latency Using Real Office 365 Applications

Private Site

A Private Site is a Windows® service that runs on any of your computers or virtual machines. Deploy a Private Site, then configure sensors for the site. Private Sites run from behind your firewall on your computers for monitoring the end-user experience from your environment. You can also think of a Private Site as an agent. For more information, refer to Private Sites.

Public Site

Public Sites are managed by Exoprise at various locations throughout the world and are great for comparing against internal LAN/WAN conditions. Public Sites are also important for monitoring and measuring end-user experience from outside the corporate LAN/MPLS/WAN. For more information, refer to Public Sites.

Round-trip time (RTT)

In networking, the round-trip delay time or round-trip time is the length of time it takes for a packet to be sent, plus the length of time it takes for an acknowledgment of that signal to be received.

Secure Sockets Layer (SSL)

Secure Sockets Layer is a standard security protocol for establishing encrypted links between a web server and a browser in an online communication.

Sensor

A sensor monitors one application from one site, emulating an end-user to give you the end-user perspective of different services.

Service account

A service account is an account, typically allocated as part of a domain, that is used to run an Exoprise Private Site. Use a service account when you want to have more control over proxy setup and settings for a Private Site.

Single sign-on (SSO)

SSO allows a user to sign in to cloud and web-based services without having to enter credentials again. The sign-in process is integrated with the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP).

SSL negotiation time

The length of time it takes to establish an SSL connection between a client and a server. The negotiation of SSL connections involves some quick back and forth and is considered "chatty" on a network. Slow SSL negotiation times are usually indicative of higher latency in a network path.

Tab

Tabs (formerly known as layouts) are containers for widgets within dashboards. There are pre-configured tabs available, such as the preview tab or Microsoft 365 tab.

Time to First Byte (TTFB)

TTFB is a measurement used as an indication of the responsiveness of a web server or other network resource. TTFB measures the duration from the user or client making a request to the server and the first byte of data being received back from the server.

Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP)

TCP/IP is one of the main protocols used to interconnect network devices on the internet. TCP/IP provides reliable, ordered, and error-checked delivery of a stream of (bytes) between applications running on hosts communicating via an IP network.

User Datagram Protocol (UDP)

UDP is an alternative communications protocol to Transmission Control Protocol (TCP). It is a connectionless protocol with a minimum of mechanisms compared to TCP/IP. UDP datagrams are sent without guarantee of delivery, ordering, or duplicate protection, but they are generally faster to deliver with less overhead than TCP.

Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP)

VoIP is a group of technologies for transmitting voice data and communications over Internet Protocol networks such as the Internet.

Wait time

Depending on the type of service being monitored, wait time is calculated as the ability to successfully send packets to the service or the delay in waiting for a server to respond to a request.

WGET

WGET stands for web get. It often refers to the traditional Unix/Linux tool with the same name. Web gets are simple HTTP transactions against a web server that tests for web server performance and availability. With web gets, the entire page is not retrieved, just the top-level page request against a server. Exoprise WGET sensors can monitor up to five different URLs (or servers) from a single sensor deployment.

Widget

A widget is a sub-window or tile that exists within the tabs and dashboards in the Exoprise portal. Widgets are for visualizing cloud performance data in real-time or historically.