ThousandEyes has deployed additional monitoring vantage points across multicloud environments to gain more visibility into network performances.
San Francisco-based ThousandEyes' Network Intelligence infrastructure-as-a-service agents work across every region that Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud serve. ThousandEyes is now able to monitor vantage points across 15 AWS regions, 15 Google Cloud regions and 25 Microsoft Azure regions.
"What these vantage points give you is active visibility into all of the networks that exist around the globe," said Ameet Naik, ThousandEyes' technical marketing manager, in an interview with FierceTelecom. "What these agents provide is the ability to go in—with very minimum configuration and in a matter of minutes—and receive data and metrics from all of three cloud platforms that will help you make better data-driven decisions.
"Our more sophisticated customers already know how to deploy a VM (virtual machine) in these environments and they probably already have accounts with all of these cloud vendors so they can deploy ThousandEyes' agents themselves. With these agents, not so network savvy users—like application developers and DevOps people—can start getting metrics and baseline performances. It helps them understand the root cause of outages across complex networks that they don't own or control."
ThousandEyes' cloud agents are external vantage points that are distributed globally across its 150 points of presence, while the enterprise agents are software-based agents that are installed on networks, data centers and branch offices.
The endpoint agents are browser-based plug-ins that are installed on end users' laptops and desktop. By running tests through the cloud between cloud agents and enterprise agents, IT teams can use endpoint agents to monitor and measure performance between the cloud regions as well as intercloud performance.
Traditional monitoring vendors monitored internal networks, were point-to-point, or worked primarily with Cisco gear.
"Historically, you didn't get the insight into the network in this kind of sophisticated view that we have," said Alex Henthorn-Iwane, ThousandEyes' vice president of product marketing, in an interview with FierceTelecom. "You would use trace routing, but that didn't give you any insight into the network. We give a sophisticated view into exactly how the internet is working from all of these points."
Naik said the increased network visibility was especially important as customers migrate toward multicloud environments. Multicloud usage is increasingly being driven by infrastructure-as-a-service, software-as-a-service and platform-as-a-service users. In addition, the dynamic nature of the cloud makes it even harder to proactively monitor networks, according to Naik.
"Most enterprise IT is starting to consume more services that are running on Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and, more recently, Google Cloud," Naik said. "They are starting to treat these services as kind of extensions of their own IT environment.
"For example, if you're an app developer and you want to put an application in a certain region in AWS, now you don't have to guess how that application impacts your network. You can answer those questions in minutes with hard data you can stand behind."
Privately held ThousandEyes was founded by CEO Mohit Lad, Ph.D., and CTO Ricardo Oliveira, Ph.D., in 2010 and launched three years later. Its investors include Salesforce Ventures and Sequoia Capital, while Comcast, GitHub and Lyft are among its customers.