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Product Updates

New Innovations Driving Strategic Expansion Into Digital Experience Assurance

By Prab Singh & Marcus Sarmento
| | 12 min read

Summary

Today, we’re announcing several new Digital Experience Assurance (DXA) innovations that enhance visibility and insights, helping our customers assure every digital experience for every user, everywhere.


ThousandEyes has long been known for providing networking and IT teams with deep visibility into digital experiences across the entire user journey, including cloud, Internet, and enterprise networks. Our customers value the ability to see the Internet like their own network and that they can quickly and easily identify what’s going wrong and why, so they can collaborate effectively with their peers or providers to fix issues before the helpdesk tickets start rolling in.

Powering our ability to deliver this rich visibility and insights is an unmatched and ever-growing dataset—more than 650 billion daily measurements taken from millions of vantage points around the globe. Today, we’re at a point where the volume and scope of data, combined with our AI-native platform purpose-built to scale, allows us to do much more. While ThousandEyes has played a key role in the early development of Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) to provide a comprehensive view of digital experiences across owned and unowned environments, today, with Cisco, we’re expanding our product strategy and capabilities to usher in the next era of Digital Experience Assurance (DXA)—extending beyond monitoring to closed-loop actions driving a more proactive approach to operations. 

Today, we’re also announcing several new DXA innovations that enhance visibility and insights, helping our customers assure every digital experience for every user everywhere. These new capabilities include:

  • Cloud Insights: Extend visibility inside public cloud platforms, ensuring an unmatched view of digital experience dependencies

  • Traffic Insights: Unify views of external and internal network conditions by correlating traffic flow with synthetics, streamlining operational workflows

  • Shared Cross-domain Context: Enrich Meraki with ThousandEyes insights and enhance ThousandEyes with Meraki data, providing broader context within workflows familiar to users


Cloud Insights

For many CloudOps teams, understanding how their cloud provider handles traffic is like trying to see inside a black box. Their traffic goes into the cloud and is delivered from it, but what happens inside remains obscured. Cloud providers try to address this blind spot by giving CloudOps teams information on traffic flow and events. However, the vast scale of cloud environments makes it difficult to correlate this data with users’ digital experiences.

Cloud Insights delivers deep visibility into public cloud dependencies impacting digital experiences, correlating cloud services and traffic with user experience, application health, and end-to-end network paths. This empowers CloudOps teams to quickly identify and resolve challenging issues. Starting with support for Amazon Web Services (AWS), additional cloud providers will be supported over time.

Cloud topology offers a detailed overview of how your cloud services connect, providing CloudOps teams with critical insight into service dependencies. We start by discovering the full inventory of cloud services and then stitch together a topological view of how the services interact with each other in the context of a ThousandEyes test. Each topology component is enriched with key information, such as cloud service, region, and network border group, as well as IP address and location details. Want to know which cloud instance is served by your load balancer in the us-east-1 region? With cloud topology visualizations, answering that question becomes easy.

Screenshot showing a topological view of cloud services
Figure 1. Topological view of cloud services

Traffic Flow ingests VPC flow logs from AWS and displays traffic information in pre-built dashboards, enabling CloudOps teams to see how traffic is flowing across cloud platforms. Traffic views can be filtered by a number of dimensions, such as by cloud account, region, availability zone, VPC, application, IP addresses and subnets, geographic location, and more, enabling flexible and contextual views of performance. This visibility empowers CloudOps teams to identify and fix problems faster and gives them the information they need to architect cloud workloads more efficiently.

Screenshot showing a dashboard of cloud traffic flows
Figure 2. Dashboard displaying cloud traffic 

Events takes recent configuration changes and other events, time-correlating them with views of digital experience to provide necessary context for CloudOps teams to quickly isolate root causes. For example, see when cloud instances are terminated or when security policies or routing changes are implemented.

With exceptional cloud visibility and automatic correlation to digital experience insights, Cloud Insights gives CloudOps teams the intelligence they need to proactively assure every experience, everywhere. Cloud Insights will be in Private Preview in June 2024.

Traffic Insights

Synthetic measurements provide deep insights into the health of digital experiences, but they lack context about the role network traffic plays in the degradation of experiences. Flow data gives NetOps teams this critical view of key traffic profile information such as throughput, connections per second, and destination applications so they can better comprehend how networks impact experiences. But NetOps teams still struggle to identify which network devices contribute to these degradations and where in the end-to-end network path they occur.

Traffic Insights extends ThousandEyes’ visibility deeper into on-premises networks by collecting and correlating traffic flows with synthetic measurements and path visualizations. This enables NetOps teams to quickly detect performance issues and pinpoint real traffic bottlenecks and anomalies within their networks. By providing a unified view of digital performance and network traffic conditions, customers can streamline their operational workflows and reduce their mean time to identify and remediate. ThousandEyes will support flow analysis across both Cisco and non-Cisco networking platforms, offering NetOps a more comprehensive view of their diverse environments.

Correlated insights combines synthetic measurements with flow data, allowing users to quickly navigate from path visualizations to contextual traffic flow details directly from synthetic test results. These detailed flow views allow users to filter network traffic by various dimensions, including devices, time, destination IP, interfaces, and applications. This helps NetOps teams better understand traffic patterns and the digital experience implications of how network resources are consumed.

Screenshot showing contextual flow data
Figure 3. View of contextual flow data

This new assurance capability helps eliminate the guesswork from network management. Identify top talkers, investigate large spikes or drops in traffic, and understand how application load impacts your users.

With new support for flow data, Cisco ThousandEyes is expanding the network telemetry we provide to bolster our DXA capabilities across every network and every user. Traffic Insights will be in Private Preview later this year.

Shared Cross-domain Context With ThousandEyes and Meraki

When issues arise, IT teams want to know if the problem lies in the application, the network, the LAN, or the end-user device. To do this, they need to correlate data from across the digital supply chain to get a complete understanding of the impact on digital experiences. Today, this cross-domain correlation is typically manual, with IT operations leveraging a “swivel chair” process to identify the root cause across different domain-specific systems. Today, we’re announcing two capabilities that provide teams with rich context within the Meraki and ThousandEyes views they are familiar with and trust, streamlining troubleshooting efforts.

Meraki Assurance Overview is now powered by ThousandEyes Internet and SaaS visibility, empowering IT teams with performance insights beyond their Meraki Wi-Fi and LAN environment so they know the health of their applications, can pinpoint clients that are impacted by degradations, and rapidly isolate issues across owned and unowned domains.

Screenshot of Meraki dashboard showing ThousandEyes application availability metrics
Figure 4. ThousandEyes application availability metrics in the Meraki dashboard

Meraki Wi-Fi and LAN telemetry and device information now enrich the ThousandEyes Endpoint Experience. Key information like network name, AP name, signal-to-noise ratio, and connected clients are added to ThousandEyes endpoint segment visualizations, deepening visibility into the local network and adding critical context about the user experience.

Screenshot of ThousandEyes path visualization with Meraki metrics
Figure 5. Meraki metrics within ThousandEyes path visualization

Contextual drill-down capabilities enable users to seamlessly navigate between the ThousandEyes and Meraki interfaces with just a click, significantly streamlining workflows across domains. Additionally, this functionality provides context-specific transitions between the solutions, making troubleshooting much more efficient.

Screenshot of ThousandEyes showing the power of contextual drill-downs
Figure 6. Toggle from Meraki to the ThousandEyes dashboard to see more context to impacted clients

Screenshot of the Meraki dashboard with ThousandEyes insights
Figure 7. ThousandEyes insights provide context in the Meraki dashboard

Now, IT teams can more easily troubleshoot across domains so they can limit the blast radius of issues that impact the digital experiences of their users. Shared Cross-domain Context capabilities will be in Private Preview later this year.

Powering Digital Experience Assurance Across Cisco

Today’s announcements are just the latest example of our commitment to driving Digital Experience Assurance for our customers and partners, both within our own platform and also across Cisco’s broader portfolio, including Networking, Collaboration, Security, and Observability platforms. We will always be pushing the envelope on what’s possible for providing visibility into every aspect of digital experience delivery, leveraging AI to power meaningful, contextual insights that drive action, and enabling closed-loop actions with automation across an ever-growing connected ecosystem. We’re committed to helping you transition from reactive to proactive operations, and always making it easier to see, understand, and improve digital experiences for every user across every network.


Register for our upcoming webinar to learn more about exciting ThousandEyes innovations, including those announced at Cisco Live.

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