I recently took a look at a calendar and realized that it has been over 6 months since I last stepped foot in an office. My new normal involves getting up in the morning, grabbing a cup (or three) of coffee and heading to the desk/couch/dinner table to get work done. It feels that normalcy is defined only by the moment you are in. Similarly, for monitoring digital experience, the only constant has been change. The cloud has shifted to become the new data center, the Internet has become the network backbone for how work gets done and SaaS applications are now the most critical apps for user productivity.
Today, we are launching three key capabilities to provide unparalleled visibility across increasingly complex digital supply-chains, modern application architectures and new remote work environments.
Introducing Multi-service Views
ThousandEyes has always been first and foremost about delivering the authoritative view on digital experience through an innovative path visualization. We are known for our best-in-class visualization techniques that bring the network path to life across a complex digital ecosystem of network and infrastructure providers that are outside of your control. Service-oriented visibility can be broken down into individual layers: an overlay and underlay test for SD-WAN, specialized service tests for different application dependencies, and mesh tests for clustered network services. In each situation, each layer is represented as an individual test with its own metrics and path visualization. To isolate an issue across a complex service means stepping through many separate tests to identify the problem. Until now.
Today, we are excited to introduce the next generation of visualization with Multi-service Views. Multi-service Views build upon our multi-layered visibility by enabling multiple services to be aggregated into a single visualization. ThousandEyes users can now visualize every service dependency for a digital workflow by grouping multiple tests to quickly triangulate and isolate performance degradation that is impacting end-to-end digital experience. It’s incredibly powerful innovation and a first in the industry.
Learn more about Multi-service Views in this detailed blog by Prab Singh, our Product Manager for Internet & WAN Monitoring.
Introducing Adaptive API Monitoring
Modern applications are more distributed and modular than ever before. Increasingly, apps are offloading functions to third-party services to provide key application capabilities through backend service integrations. If you pulled back the curtain of an application workflow, you’d see an orchestra of internal and external API calls working together. But what if your third-party service has a network issue, or makes a change without your knowledge? Small issues can negatively impact the experience, or worse, a change can impact the overall experience for the application.
It is clear that APIs are at the foundation of modern apps and a critical part of application workflows. But how do you model and measure these complex API-driven workflows to understand the performance and also provide the underlying visibility across the Internet?
We are excited to build upon our powerful synthetic transaction engine that we introduced last September to provide Adaptive API Monitoring for critical API transactions. This capability is found within the same JavaScript-based scripting engine and shares the same functionality for metrics, markers, and cross-layer correlation. With Adaptive API Monitoring, ThousandEyes customers can now dynamically measure and test user-experience-impacting, critical workflows and backend interactions between an application and external API endpoints, including availability, performance, as well as application logic.
Learn more about Adaptive API Monitoring in this detailed blog by Mike Hicks on our Product Marketing team.
Expanding VPN Visibility to Support a Secure Workforce
One thing that’s been true since the pandemic shifted employees to work from home is that VPNs have become household conversations around the dinner table. The unprecedented demand on VPN infrastructure has strained IT’s ability to delivered a great user experience for employees. But while VPNs can be the smoking gun, there are many steps in the digital supply chain from a user to the application. Device health, WiFi signal, wireless gateway congestion, and local ISPs can all impact a person’s digital experience. When the traffic is tunneled through a VPN, most monitoring visibility is severely compromised, leaving support teams with little ability to understand the root cause.
Today, we are announcing expanded visibility for VPN and zero-trust providers. With ThousandEyes, we automatically detect and configure visibility into VPN or zero-trust services within our path visualization and provide detailed metrics and views for the overlay and underlay paths through these network services. With this expanded visibility, ThousandEyes customers can now rapidly diagnose issues for remote workers between the user, the VPN concentrator, and the target application. The Endpoint Agent has become an invaluable tool for IT organizations that need to support a distributed workforce and troubleshoot the myriad of issues that can (and do) arise.
Learn more about VPN Visibility in this detailed blog by our Product Manager for End User Monitoring, Alex Cruz Farmer.
These are just three of many new capabilities that our team has been working on. I encourage you to watch our on-demand webinar to get additional detailed demos of these new capabilities and, as always, keep up with our changelog as we continue to push the bar forward.