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Product Updates

New Features Roundup – August 2022

By Jillian Murphy & Brian Tobia
| | 9 min read

Summary

We have new features for ThousandEyes customers that can make configuring our product, integrating apps, and troubleshooting issues more straightforward.


Welcome to the New Features Roundup, a blog series where we highlight noteworthy enhancements to our product to address your needs. We at ThousandEyes are committed to providing you with the most effective monitoring platform for your increasingly complex network. Our ever-increasing support for configuration ease, robust integrations, and troubleshooting intelligence will empower your organization to gain even more helpful visibility into your network and applications.

To accompany our posts, we will also be hosting a quarterly webinar series for our customers where we’ll demo new features and discuss ones that we’re currently working on, and create a direct channel for your questions and feedback. We will post details for the New Features Roundup webinar on our homepage as soon as they are available. In the meantime, check out these updates.


Workflow Automation

Integrate seamlessly across your technology ecosystems for better efficiency and lower management overhead.

Automatic Session Testing

Business-critical services such as Webex and Zoom often use dynamic hosting, making it nearly impossible to monitor effectively. To address this, we developed Automated Session Testing, a feature that offers you “under-the-hood” visibility into the network path every time the user connects to a collaboration application. 

An industry-first capability, Automatic Session Testing automatically monitors the necessary targets and analyzes application traffic, the findings of which you can see on your ThousandEyes dashboard. Identify common headache-inducing issues, such as trouble connecting multiple users to a virtual meeting, and use our insights to resolve them swiftly.

Figure-1-network-path-visualization.png
Figure 1. Network path visualization of a user connecting to different Webex service locations  

Learn more about automated session tests here:

ThousandEyes Terraform Provider

ThousandEyes is now a registered Terraform provider, allowing you to standardize environment configurations and integrate them into your automation workflows. This plugin will streamline test and agent configurations when you need to bring up new account groups or testing profiles.

For more details, please see the following resources:

We also have an in-depth configuration tutorial with code examples in the following blog post.

Next Generation Webhooks

The ThousandEyes platform supports webhooks, i.e., user-defined HTTP callbacks, as a notification mechanism when an alert is raised. With our next-generation of webhooks, you can easily send ThousandEyes alert data into third-party ITSM tools. This new model supports a fully flexible JSON payload, headers, and URL query parameters that can be designed and customized for any system and format. There is also support for dynamic variables to pass in additional information in whatever form the data is sent from an alerting perspective. This flexibility lets you add data to help IT teams better triage issues, route issues to the appropriate teams, add runbooks, and define incident severity.

This feature also includes templates for some of the most common integrations, such as Splunk, Microsoft Teams, and Slack.

All these integrations can be viewed in one place, allowing you to easily see where they are assigned and leverage them in more tests.

Cisco Catalyst 8500 and Cisco ASR 1000 Container Installation Support: The ThousandEyes Enterprise Agent for Cisco Application Hosting now supports the Catalyst 8500 and ASR 1000 routing platforms.

Intel NUC 11 Support: ThousandEyes now supports installing Enterprise Agents on Intel NUC 11 devices.


Faster Insights

Discover root causes faster with integrated access to critical information and greater data granularity.

As more applications migrate to the cloud, it is increasingly important to identify where performance issues are occurring. As a ThousandEyes customer, we want to enable you to leverage network test data within the enterprise applications you already use. As such, we’re delighted to announce several new integrations and have many more to come.

Webex Control Hub + ThousandEyes Integration

ThousandEyes’ new integration with Webex makes it possible to immediately know whose device, network or application is performing poorly and affecting your users’ experience. The Webex Control Hub can now link session information to ThousandEyes’ network path visualization to quickly identify where and what is causing a service disruption. You can read more about this integration on the Webex Blog and the ThousandEyes Webex Monitoring overview.

Figure-2-webex-control-hub.png
Figure 2. ThousandEyes network path visualizations are now embedded within Webex Control Hub  

Webex Cloud Agents

ThousandEyes has now deployed Webex-specific Cloud Agents at the front door of several Webex data centers responsible for serving customer traffic. These agents are available for general use by all ThousandEyes customers and are a tool to better monitor and troubleshoot your Webex performance.

Please see the ThousandEyes Webex Monitoring solutions page for more details.

Additional Improvements

Agent View: This “single pane of glass” is explicitly designed for help desk and IT support teams to reduce MTTI/MTTR by providing quicker and more comprehensive insights into user experience using correlated data visualization. 

Updates To Dynamic Baselines in Alerting: We have simplified the process of configuring dynamic baselines for alerts and added 33 new metrics that customers can use for setup.

Continuous Monitoring (Packet Spreading): You can now configure ThousandEyes to send one packet per second over the full duration of a network test to provide more accurate results for real-time or latency-sensitive applications.

Updated Cloud Agent Locations: We have added Cloud Agents to multiple geographic locations as well as embedded ISP locations.


Operational Intelligence

Enhance operational efficiency and predictability in the network experience with sophisticated recommendations.

WAN Insights

WAN Insights enables enterprises to move from reactive to preventative. By using this new feature of Internet Insights, you will be able to improve operational efficiency and the assurance of application experience. By continuously analyzing performance data and applying predictive modeling to forecast conditions to recommend actions, WAN Insights enables IT teams to proactively avoid experience degradation, allowing the organization to confidently deliver the best possible user experience.

With WAN Insights, organizations will now have a powerful guide that provides actionable recommendations to reduce issues and optimize performance across Internet, cloud, and SaaS. You can read more details about WAN Insights in the announcement blog.

Figure-3-forecasting-assurance.png
Figure 3. Forecasting assurance of application experience

Provider Labels: You can now use provider labels (including by region) to customize the Internet Insights overview, views, alerts, dashboards and reports, as well as track and maintain labels within catalog settings.


We look forward to demonstrating even more improvements during our next ThousandEyes New Features Roundup in the near future. In the meantime, if these updates interest you and you’re eager to see a demo, you can request one here.


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