Cisco has heavily invested in ThousandEyes, expanding its powerful capabilities over the last six months. Acquired by Cisco in 2020, this all-seeing tool for tracking and troubleshooting network and application issues is a rising star across Cisco’s security portfolio.
This substantial investment in ThousandEyes is evident with a slew of new features added to the vendor-agnostic platform. Let’s take a look at what’s new, and what they mean for your organisation.
It’s a fitting name, ThousandEyes, given its extensive monitoring capabilities. The platform offers an end-to-end view of digital experiences for every user, across any application, and over any network – even those not owned by the organisation using it. With over 650 billion daily measurements from millions of vantage points around the globe, ThousandEyes offers deep insights into network paths and performance issues. Often dubbed the ‘Google Maps’ of the internet, it visually represents how data travels across networks and where problems – like traffic jams – occur.
Digital Experience Assurance (DXA)
No new enhancement announcement would be complete without some impressive new AI capabilities, and ThousandEyes doesn’t disappoint with the announcement of Digital Experience Assurance (DXA). While customers have been largely limited to monitoring their IT infrastructure for network issues in the past, this new set of AI-powered capabilities introduce the ability to automatically act on network quality issues.
DXA shifts ThousandEyes’ customers from passive monitoring with human remediation, to active, AI-driven assurance and automated remediation. It means that customers can not only detect issues faster, but also automatically address them, improving IT productivity and issue resolution times. According to a Forrester study, organisations using ThousandEyes saw a 50-80% decrease in mean time to resolution (MTTR) of issues and more than a 50% increase in IT team productivity. That’s surely music to your NetOps teams ears.
Using AI to interpret graphs and reports
Arguably, AI’s ability to turn raw data into valuable business intelligence is one of its biggest strengths. Google Cloud’s Vertex AI – a multimodal AI platform that can process both text and images – can be used to turn ThousandEyes’ data and insights into meaningful network performance analysis, allowing users to quickly grasp the implications of issues, assess their impact, and make data-led remediation decisions.
Here’s how it works:
In this demo, we walk you through how easy it is to transform raw ThousandEyes data into an easily digestible report complete with actionable insights and recommendations.
Enhanced API monitoring for improved digital services
ThousandEyes has introduced a new Application Programming Interface (API) monitoring feature to help DevOps and Network Operations teams keep a closer eye on web services and applications. If you rely heavily on APIs for your digital operations, you will find this addition particularly valuable as its understanding of API performance takes users well beyond uptime, downtime, and latency.
A user-friendly step-by-step builder guides users through setting up and managing simple API checks or more complex, multi-step API transactions. Information is then passed between steps, mimicking real-world API usage scenarios, which translates into more realistic and relevant testing.
ThousandEyes then serves up a comprehensive view of API performance, providing a detailed breakdown for each step in a transaction. Granular insight like this helps IT teams quickly identify and troubleshoot specific issues within complex API calls, a previously difficult task.
There’s also a ThousandEyes integration with Amazon Web Services (AWS) API Gateway that allows businesses using these cloud services to automatically discover API endpoints and create monitoring templates. AWS users will now find it incredibly easy to implement robust API monitoring across their cloud infrastructure.
When your data and applications are sent to the cloud, it’s a bit like putting them into a box. You know your data goes in, and you know it comes out, but what happens inside that box has been a mystery. While cloud providers like AWS are able to provide some information about how your data is being handled – such as traffic flow and issues or changes, the complexity of cloud environments makes it hard to connect this information with what your users are experiencing.
Therein lies the power of Cloud Insights, it shines a light on what happens to your data when it’s in the cloud, and what it means for users. With Cloud Insights you can understand the dependencies affecting your services, see which cloud services and traffic patterns are impacting your users and monitor the overall performance and health of your applications. In essence, you finally get that complete journey of your data from start to finish. This means that your CloudOps team can now identify and resolve problems, ultimately ensuring a better experience for users everywhere.
Currently, Cloud Insights supports AWS. Over time, it’s expected to roll out to other cloud providers. Cloud Insights was in Private Preview from June 2024 – but stay tuned for the wider release.
Although businesses do not own AWS infrastructure or connectivity, they are still responsible for user experience and service delivery. Another way ThousandEyes is shining a light on this third-party oversight is through the deployment of Cloud Agents within various AWS Local Zones. Fully managed by ThousandEyes, these agents require no setup and can be used immediately in network tests. Using these agents supports more accurate simulation and monitoring of user experience close to your applications or users. This helps pinpoint and troubleshoot performance issues effectively.
Government use case of Cloud Agents:
Previously, government agencies faced restrictions that prevented them from effectively monitoring end-to-end performance of public-facing applications. With the availability of ThousandEyes Cloud Agents within AWS Local Zones, these restrictions are circumvented to allow for continual performance monitoring.
Take the scenario of a government department offering a mobile application for citizens to access various public services, such as filing taxes and obtaining healthcare information. The application’s frontend runs on AWS Wavelength for enhanced responsiveness, while backend services are hosted in a government-approved cloud, or an on-premises data centre. The ThousandEyes AWS Wavelength agent allows the department to monitor end-to-end performance – from the edge computing environment to the backend systems. This ensures a seamless user experience for citizens accessing government services via their mobile devices, irrespective of their location or network conditions.
AWS also enables an outside-in view, allowing government agencies to test public-facing applications like MyGov or the ATO website from the internet. This helps agencies understand how well their services are working for citizens, ensuring reliable and efficient access to public services.
As more applications leverage public cloud resources, the network paths and performance metrics become less transparent. This is because once traffic enters the cloud provider’s network, traditional monitoring tools lose visibility into the specific paths and performance details. Blind to the network realities, IT teams struggle to identify and pinpoint the location of network issues, let alone resolve them.
In late 2023, ThousandEyes introduced that much-missing visibility into AWS networks and services.
Using a combination of external monitoring and AWS-specific data, IT teams are now able to quickly identify concrete performance issues, such as those related to Global Accelerator nodes. This newly unified view of application delivery paths spells faster troubleshooting and more effective communication with AWS when addressing performance problems. Ultimately this feature will improve the overall management of cloud-based applications and services.
This new capability fits right in with ThousandEyes’ continuing vendor-agnostic approach as it sheds light on AWS networks while remaining an independent solution. Interestingly, both AWS and Microsoft actually use ThousandEyes themselves, a fact that speaks volumes about the tool’s effectiveness across different cloud setups.
Let’s face it – hiccups in digital service are bound to happen. By zeroing in on the nitty-gritty details of network experience and providing clear next steps, ThousandEyes (and all its new latest enhancements) offers a more insightful, visibility-fuelled way for IT teams to improve their digital service delivery and customer experience.
To learn more about Cisco ThousandEyes, or to request your free 15-day trial, get in touch with one of Data#3’s Cisco specialists today.