Deploy and Operationalize Network Assurance

ThousandEyes is the network assurance platform that provides you with continuous, real-time visibility into your Internet-enabled, cloud-delivered, and on-premises applications. Our SaaS platform is one that utilizes synthetic monitoring tests to measure end-to-end application and user experience and network performance and provides network path visibility, no matter where the applications or your users are located.

ThousandEyes has produced a series of getting-started guides to help IT teams rapidly deploy and operationalize the ThousandEyes solution for immediate and actionable monitoring. This blog will cover 6 steps in your ThousandEyes journey, taking you from initial account setup all the way to advanced automation and integration use cases. Here is a reference to the appropriate Getting Started guides for each step:

Step 1. Streamlined Account Setup

Step 2. End-to-end Visibility for Any Network

Step 3. Holistic Monitoring for Any Digital Service

Step 4. Real-time Alerts for Proactive Issue Detection

Step 5. Empowering Efficient IT Operations

Step 6. Automation and ITOps Integration

Please note that the Getting Started guides, Sharelinks, and other resources used in this blog are listed again at the end for ease of reference.

Step 1: Streamlined Account Setup

Your first step in setting up ThousandEyes involves configuring your account. The getting-started guides assume that you already have a ThousandEyes account and can access and log in to our SaaS platform at https://app.thousandeyes.com/ using a web browser. If you are not yet a customer of ours, you can sign up for a 15-day free trial account here.

Getting Started With Account Setup

ThousandEyes offers robust account configuration, including role-based access control (RBAC) as well as integration with Single Sign-On (SSO). As such, the first getting started guide we recommend you read is Getting Started with Account Setup to learn how to configure your ThousandEyes account, integrate with your existing SSO, track usage, and view account activity.

Step 2: End-to-end Visibility for Any Network

This step covers the use and deployment of ThousandEyes agents. ThousandEyes delivers cross-layer monitoring tests for cloud, enterprise, and managed endpoints using software agents and ThousandEyes’ unique synthetic monitoring technologies. ThousandEyes agents can be run in cloud environments, on premises within your own data centers and enterprise networks, or on employee endpoints to enable a 360-degree view of your hybrid digital ecosystem.

Getting Started With ThousandEyes Cloud and Enterprise Agents

You can start monitoring immediately from the providers and regions that best simulate your end-user performance using ThousandEyes Cloud Agents. These pre-deployed agents are located in over 250 cities around the world in 64 countries and are available for your use today.

With ThousandEyes Enterprise Agents, you can easily deploy ThousandEyes in your own managed environments, such as in your data centers or cloud VPCs. These agents enable you to monitor from your campus edge to your SaaS provider as well as private WAN networks.

In Getting Started with Cloud and Enterprise Agents, you’ll learn how ThousandEyes Cloud and Enterprise Agents can be easily configured to monitor the performance of your critical services. One of the powerful parts of ThousandEyes tests is network path visualization, which provides hop-by-hop details and performance metrics of the path that the test (and your users) take as they traverse the Internet, cloud provider networks, or your internal network. Path visualization can help to quickly pinpoint issues, as illustrated in Figure 1.

*Figure 1. Cloud Agent tests detect a problem in the path between Auckland and LinkedIn*

Getting Started With Endpoint Agents

Enterprises benefit from ThousandEyes Endpoint Agents by using them to proactively monitor and isolate problems with end users and their connections to critical applications. This level of end user visibility and correlation greatly improves service desk mean time to resolution (MTTR).

Getting Started with Endpoint Agents provides the steps needed for you to implement ThousandEyes End User Monitoring. Learn how Endpoint Agents provide visibility into the user experience of SaaS and internally-hosted applications in context with the underlying wireless LAN, WAN, Internet connectivity, and system health. Operations teams can use this capability to automatically monitor network connectivity for dynamic applications like Webex, Microsoft Teams, and Zoom using ThousandEyes Automated Session Tests.

See how you can troubleshoot with ThousandEyes Endpoint Agents using this quick guide and interactive Sharelink, as shown in Figure 2 below.

*Figure 2. Endpoint Agent view showing the health of a remote worker’s application sessions*

Step 3: Holistic Monitoring for Any Digital Service

Now that you understand ThousandEyes agents, it’s time to put them to work with ThousandEyes tests. Whether you’re monitoring complex sequential API calls for your cloud-based applications and their dependencies, business-critical SaaS services used by your hybrid workforce, or vital WAN network infrastructure endpoints, ThousandEyes tests have you covered.

Getting Started With Cloud and Enterprise Agent Tests

Getting Started with Cloud and Enterprise Agent Tests covers the basics of configuring ThousandEyes tests to provide visibility into your critical network infrastructure and business services. You’ll learn how to create tests and interpret the data so you can quickly mitigate service disruptions and answer the age-old question: Where is the problem, the network or the application? Using ThousandEyes, you can pinpoint the problem and engage the right person or team at the right time.

See how you can troubleshoot with ThousandEyes Cloud Agent tests using this quick guide and interactive Sharelink, as shown in Figure 3 below.

*Figure 3. ThousandEyes Cloud Agent tests used to troubleshoot a SaaS performance issue*

Getting Started With Transactions

Some applications require more complex monitoring that may involve a sequence of steps. ThousandEyes transaction tests accommodate this need for adaptive monitoring.

Getting Started with Transactions reviews how to implement and utilize your own ThousandEyes transaction tests. You can configure ThousandEyes transaction tests to mimic user actions or API sequences that provide deep insight into the user experience. These capabilities enable you to ensure that the user journey completes successfully or, in the event that a problem occurs, it can be rapidly isolated to an application or network issue.

See how you can troubleshoot complex application performance issues with ThousandEyes Transaction tests using this quick guide and interactive Sharelink, as shown in Figure 4 below.

Figure 4. Payment API transaction test showing a performance degradation — *Figure 4. ThousandEyes payment API transaction test showing a performance degradation*

Step 4: Real-time Alerts for Proactive Issue Detection

Now that we have visibility and monitoring in place, how do we get alerted during a problem? ThousandEyes offers a range of notification options and customizable thresholds to alert you when performance conditions deviate from your healthy baselines. Whether you use email, collaboration tools such as Microsoft Teams or Webex by Cisco, or ITOps tools such as PagerDuty or ServiceNow, ThousandEyes makes it easy to send alerts using existing systems for simple alignment with your ITOps processes.

Getting Started With Alerts

Getting Started with Alerts covers everything you need to integrate alert notifications into your workflow using email or webhooks for third-party systems. Figure 5 shows an example of alerting threshold configurations.

Figure 5. Fully customized alerting to accommodate any SLAs and SLOs — *Figure 5. Fully customized alerting available on ThousandEyes to accommodate any SLAs* *and SLOs*

Step 5: Empowering Efficient IT Operations

Performance metric data is great, but can it show trends and macro issues? Ours can! ThousandEyes dashboards provide a customized interface to help you organize and visualize your data and performance trends. Our collective intelligence-powered Internet Insights can help you quickly identify major, widespread network and application outages across the global Internet that are affecting your applications and users.

Getting Started With Dashboards

Getting Started with Dashboards provides the steps you need to create a dashboard using widgets to show your key performance indicators (KPIs) and provide your teams with broader visibility. You can use ThousandEyes dashboards as a powerful tool to help visualize performance trends as well as application and network health.

Use this interactive Sharelink to see a Webex performance metrics dashboard, as shown in Figure 6 below.

Figure 6. Customized dashboards show you the data you need and care about — *Figure 6. Customized ThousandEyes dashboards show you the data you need and care about*

Getting Started With Internet Insights

Getting Started with Internet Insights reviews the fundamentals of ThousandEyes Internet Insights, our global outage detection platform. ThousandEyes Internet Insights and Application Outages algorithmically leverages our massive data set to help teams rapidly isolate and remediate issues. Learn from this getting-started resource how ThousandEyes can enable your operations teams with visibility into larger-scale outages suffered by network and application providers.

Figure 7. Internet Insights rapidly identifies network and application outages — *Figure 7. Internet Insights* *rapidly identifies network and application outages*

Step 6: Automation and ITOps Integration

ThousandEyes provides the tools your teams need to automate tasks and integrate ThousandEyes with their third-party systems. DevOps teams can take advantage of our Terraform provider for ThousandEyes to scale and streamline application monitoring and use our ThousandEyes API Postman Collection to pull data using our API. Click here for additional information on the ThousandEyes DevOps integrations.

Getting Started With the ThousandEyes API

In Getting Started with the ThousandEyes API, we review how to access and programmatically use the ThousandEyes RESTful API. There are many different API endpoints that can be used to automate administration tasks, extract test data, and integrate into your workflow. This guide includes examples using CLI tools, python, and node.js to help you on your journey.

See here for an example API code snippet done with Python that requests, parses, and outputs the network latency for all ThousandEyes agents in a single test over the last hour.

Your Dedicated Team of Network Intelligence Experts

Customers can contact the ThousandEyes Customer Engineering team 24 hours a day, 7 days a week through email, chat app, and via the web using our support portal. Customer Engineering provides technical support to customers who have an account for the ThousandEyes application. Whether you’re new to proactive monitoring or a seasoned network pro, our team of network intelligence experts is here to support you every step of the way.

Quick Links and Additional Resources

Product Updates

Deploy and Operationalize Network Assurance

Summary