SOLUTIONS

Microburst Detection & Analysis

See the millisecond bursts that hide in one-second averages

CHALLENGES

Milliseconds on the wire, millions on the line

In demanding environments, such as stock exchanges and high-frequency trading, milliseconds matter. Even the slightest delay can have significant consequences – application slowdowns, intermittent retransmissions, unexpected latency, and security vulnerabilities.

Microbursts are commonly to blame. These high-intensity spikes last just milliseconds, but can overload switch buffers and cause packet loss. At 100G, a link carries 12.5 MB every millisecond – enough to exhaust a shallow buffer before anyone notices.

Microbursts are nearly invisible to monitoring tools that report packet utilization at one-second intervals or longer.

Teams end up chasing the wrong cause, while unexplained symptoms consume troubleshooting time and strain SLAs.

OUTCOMES

What changes when you can detect every burst

Uphold Customer SLAs

Meet service-level commitments by catching the hidden bursts that erode application and cloud service performance.

Protect Service Revenue

Reduce the lost transactions and service degradations that cost revenue and push customers toward other providers.

Reduce Security Exposure

Lower the risk of service outages from short-lived, burst-based DDoS traffic that can overwhelm firewalls and IDS/IPS before they react.

Proactive Capacity Investment

Align costly WAN and uplink expansions to the peaks your traffic actually produces, instead of averages that understate demand.

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SOLUTIONS

Explore how cPacket can help you solve this challenge.

TRADITIONAL SOLUTION

Traditional cPacket Solution

cPacket measures traffic at the wire at millisecond resolution, so you can see, attribute, and measure every microburst in real time.

cVu packet brokers run cBurst analytics on every monitored link – detecting peaks, attributing its source, and measuring its duration to judge severity. Teams then use cClear Control Center with Grafana dashboards to identify the actual traffic peaks, so they can rebalance streams, tune QoS, or add capacity where it’s needed.

REQUIRED PRODUCTS

KEY FEATURES

Source and Duration Analytics

cBurst analytics pinpoint which client, server or workload caused each burst and how many milliseconds it exceeded the threshold, so teams can fix the real cause.

Nanosecond Timestamping

Helps teams correlate bursts with the drops and latency spikes they cause, using hardware timestamps on every packet with nanosecond accuracy.

Peak-vs-Average Dashboards

cClear dashboards show peak millisecond throughput alongside one-second averages, and Grafana notifies operators when bursts exceed utilization thresholds.

AI SOLUTION

Right tool

cPacket AI Workflow

cPacket AI lets engineers pinpoint microbursts in minutes

The AI client accesses millisecond-level measurements and utilization data through MCP servers, and correlates it using built-in skills. It then returns a report showing where bursts originate, which clients they affect, and how much risk they pose. While detection and analysis are automated, remediation decisions stay with your team.

REQUIRED PRODUCTS

KEY FEATURES

Conversational Investigation

Ask a question and get an analysis of burst locations, durations, and affected clients without writing queries or navigating dashboards.

Access to High-Resolution Packet Data

cPacket MCP servers give AI clients direct access to millisecond burst and utilization metrics, so answers rest on wire data rather than averaged counters.

Automated Burst Impact Reports

The AI compiles findings into a report that identifies burst sources, affected clients, and overall network impact for engineering and leadership review.

Frequently Asked Questions

Get answers to common questions about network observability and cPacket solutions.

What is a microburst?

Microbursts are sudden, high-intensity spikes in network traffic that last just milliseconds. Without millisecond-resolution network observability tools, microbursts are invisible to most network operations teams.

How to microbursts impact my network?

Although they are sporadic and short-lived, microbursts can disrupt application performance, cause security vulnerabilities, and create network blind spots. If left undetected over time, microbursts can lead to significant issues for service reliability, customer experience, and revenue.

How does cPacket detect microbursts?

cVu NG/NGE packet brokers measure bursts at 1ms resolution, and cVu AG measures at 10ms. The underlying packet timestamps are accurate to nanoseconds – within 30ns at 95% confidence with a PPS reference on cVu NG/NGE.

How can I identify what caused a burst?

cPacket makes it easy to identify the cause and duration of microbursts. Its unique cBurst filter, analyze, and attribute each burst to a specific client, server, or workload.

Why don't SNMP polling or switch counters catch microbursts?

SNMP typically polls every 30 seconds or longer and averages throughput across the interval, so a 10ms burst to line rate disappears. Switch buffer counters can indicate that a burst occurred, but not which traffic caused it or how long it lasted.

Can we use burst data with our existing dashboards and tools?

The cPacket Control Center (known as cClear) exposes metrics through REST APIs and a documented metrics database schema, so teams can feed burst and utilization data into broader corporate dashboards.

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