For more than a decade, ThousandEyes has been on a mission to help our customers to see every network like it’s their own. We have empowered teams in every business vertical with actionable, reliable data across the Internet and their private networks in an effort to help them move to software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications or migrate their own applications to the cloud.
But seeing cloud networks demands a different approach than what’s needed to measure experience across the Internet and private networks. For cloud providers, traditional concepts like IP addresses have less significance because the microservices used to serve end users can create their own ephemeral containers as needed. And these services can even be deployed across the cloud and span many accounts, subscriptions, or projects, making it difficult to have a single solution that measures the entire experience from end to end.
To help our customers truly see every network like it’s their own, we’ve introduced new techniques that can stitch together the cloud connectivity layer with the on-premise and Internet networks. And this new capability that measures experience deeper into the cloud and combines it with on-premise and Internet views is what we’re calling ThousandEyes Cloud Insights. Cloud Insights extends visibility deep inside public cloud infrastructure, automatically correlating configuration changes and flow logs from across cloud environments with ThousandEyes' digital experience insights.
This week at AWS re:Invent, we’re demonstrating how Cloud Insights provides even greater transparency and troubleshooting precision inside the Amazon Web Services (AWS) network. In this blog, we’ll cover what users can expect when support for AWS is generally available later this month.
Cloud Blind Spots Impact Business Outcomes
Enterprises have long understood the benefits of migrating their business-critical systems to the cloud, including cost efficiencies, greater flexibility, and scalability to name a few. Despite the advantages of moving to the cloud, IT teams have come to realize that, in practice, there are some major limitations.
A lack of visibility inside cloud providers’ infrastructure is a top concern, making it impractical and time-consuming for IT teams to troubleshoot network and service issues that are impacting their users. Moreover, measuring a user experience journey from end to end typically spans multiple accounts or subscriptions, making for a disjointed measure of experience across cloud providers.
ThousandEyes Cloud Insights has been designed to solve this challenge head on, providing Operations teams with unmatched visibility into and across the cloud infrastructure their organization relies on and enabling them to provide exceptional digital experiences for their users.
Surface Every Cloud Dependency, Automatically
Cloud Insights automatically discovers cloud resources across every account, creating a full inventory of services that impact digital experiences. For teams with multiple cloud accounts, this provides an account-agnostic layer to view all resources and greatly reduces the time it takes when investigating or searching through inventory items. Situations like this would normally require Operations teams to view the information for each different cloud provider and then manually correlate it.
The new Cloud Topology view provides service-level insight into infrastructure that is configured in AWS, and it is deeply integrated with other layers of the Network and Application Synthetics views—effectively stitching together an Internet-centric or private network Path Visualization complete with cloud topology.
Figure 1. Cloud Insights AWS Topology View
See How Cloud Traffic and Configuration Changes Impact Performance
Limited visibility inside cloud provider networks can create operational blind spots and lead to inefficient troubleshooting and increased resolution times when problems occur. Cloud Insights correlates configuration changes (and other operational or provider events) with application and network response times to pinpoint the source of issues faster.
Additionally, Operations teams can now also use Cloud Insights to analyze user traffic flowing through their cloud provider’s network to instantly see a sudden increase (or decrease) in traffic, looking at VPC flow logs that are embedded in the Network and Application Synthetics views. This helps reduce the time it takes to identify the root cause of an issue by offering a centralized view across cloud resources and troubleshooting domains, which they can then quickly pivot to for further action.
Users can also use a new, general purpose cloud-based VPC flow log analysis engine to aid in traffic discovery across regions, VPCs, or Internet egress. ThousandEyes’ new Cloud Insights Views provide filters to help users focus on a historical trend of traffic volume between any two entities in the cloud. Users can filter by AWS account, region, availability zone, subnet, AWS tags, and more.
Figure 2. AWS Traffic Flow View in Cloud Insights
Direct Connect Visibility
With Cloud Insights, Operations teams can now monitor and troubleshoot the path between data centers and AWS-hosted applications over their AWS Direct Connect paths. AWS Direct Connect paths avoid the public Internet and are often used for hybrid environments with on premises and AWS applications and form a critical link in the enterprise network. Cloud Insights enables the path to be monitored and tracked for traffic throughput and configuration changes.
See the Cloud Like You Own It
With Cloud Insights, Operations teams can finally see into and across their critical cloud networks with a similar level of granularity and precision that they could for their own internal networks. This dramatically improves troubleshooting efforts, lowers the mean time to resolution (MTTR), and helps foster more positive user experiences. While Cloud Insights will be generally available later this month, you can watch the demo today to get a first look.
How To Get Started With Cloud Insights
Current ThousandEyes customers can access Cloud Insights today through the limited preview available in the ThousandEyes platform—you can follow these setup instructions to get started. Starting on December 12, non-ThousandEyes customers can try Cloud Insights by starting a free trial and requesting access.