A year ago, we couldn’t have imagined that we would spend most of 2020 in the grip of a global pandemic. Many of us still haven’t set foot in our offices since we were sent home to work early this year. For companies, it meant rapid change and a transition to remote work wherever possible. I still vividly remember the pain shared by customers as they navigated the rapid pace of the transition in its early days, over 6 months ago. Services and providers were put under immense strain. And with the network visibility that customers had in the enterprise setting often lost in the transition, ThousandEyes customers came to rely on Internet Insights more than ever.
Today, we are announcing the immediate availability of Internet Insights network outage metrics in ThousandEyes dashboards and reports. This new capability supports the evolution of Internet Insights from a critical operations role to a strategic enabler for executive reporting and enterprise network planning use cases. Customers can now build their own views of user and employee digital experience as well as provider quality, leveraging our collective intelligence, which goes beyond their own tests.
We will cover this in more detail in the sections below as well as revisit some highlights of the year and take a moment to acknowledge the industry accolades Internet Insights has received thus far. With these new capabilities, we’re giving our customers more actionable intelligence to navigate the next normal, one that in large part (as I hear from customers) is here to stay.
Real Network Data Provides Real Solutions
If you’re a subscriber to our podcast The Internet Report, you know that hardly a day goes by without an Internet outage in the news. These outages have a real impact on our customers, and they need data—backed by real, authoritative network measurements—and insights delivered in real time to understand their impact.
In a recent example, one of our customers, a health-insurance company navigating the incumbent challenges of COVID-19 itself, was looking for help to identify recurring issues with provider reliability affecting employee collaboration as they navigated the monumental effort of a remote work transformation. In the early days of our relationship, Internet Insights identified an outage affecting one of their network providers and correlated it with the recurring degradation of their videoconferencing service which had impacted key events and users who were already dealing with the challenges of working from home.
Previously at the mercy of providers, our customer now had the data to tie the app degradation to the recurring provider issue; data which they had been missing all along. They took action and within 45 minutes, their intermediate service provider had withdrawn routes to the provider. Within 90 minutes, our customer had withdrawn their own routes and published new ones. They’ve since turned down their circuit with the provider. The Internet is vast and impossible to monitor alone, but together (and with real data, not just sentiment) you can make changes and drive your providers to improve.
Collective Intelligence Metrics Added to Dashboards and Reports
Now, that we’ve come to rely so much on the Internet isn’t a total surprise, it’s indispensable in almost every part of our lives. That’s why we launched ThousandEyes Internet Insights™—the first and only collectively powered view of global Internet performance—late last year. This November marks the one-year anniversary of the launch.
Since then, one of our top requests was to bring our macro-level data for Internet-scale outages to ThousandEyes dashboards and reports. Many customers had leveraged the Internet Insights Alerts API to visualize outage data in their own analytics software, but they wanted to slice and dice and accelerate the process by curating their own views right on the ThousandEyes platform.
Build Custom Views of How Internet Events Impact You and Your Tests
Internet Insights customers can now add widgets to dashboards and reports, leveraging Internet Insights network outage metrics. The Internet Insights data source provides four Network Outages metrics within dashboards and reports (and APIs). This includes Affected Tests (organization test data affected by outages), Interfaces (interface data affected by outages), Locations (location data affected by outages), and, of course, our Outages data.
In the example above, we used the “Outage Scope” filter set to a value of “With Affected Tests” to limit the outages listed by the outage metric to only outages impacting one of the customer’s tests. We could then easily see the outages by provider, ranked by the total number of tests affected. But we are just scratching the surface with Outage Scope! We’ve added a number of filter attributes and conditions customers can use to pivot the Network Outages metrics: Catalog Provider, Outage Scope, and Network; Interface Location and Interface IP Address; Affected Test and Affected Domain; and Server Location, Server Prefix, and Server Network. All so you can build the dynamic view you need.
Your Own Collective View to Customer and Employee Experience, and Provider Quality
Additionally, customers will see an "Internet Insights Built-in" default dashboard, which shows weekly and monthly outage trends as well as an always up-to-date view of the most impacted tests, locations and providers. You can also duplicate the default dashboard to use as a starting point for building custom dashboards.
Specific Actionable Intelligence, Beyond Affected Tests
The dashboard capabilities outlined above underscore a core use case of Internet Insights: when customers see their tests failing, they want to know, “Is it just me?” When Internet Insights detects an outage that impacts a test, you know “It’s not just you, it’s an Internet outage.”
Internet Insights delivers visibility that goes beyond a customer’s own tests and one year of historical outage data. For the first time, customers will be able to leverage that depth of data to create their own views and drive the level of actionable intelligence they derive from Internet Insights for their organization even higher. Beyond test correlation with outages, which highlight internal vs. external disruptions, build your own dashboards with widgets that use network outage metrics to highlight and aggregate events by provider, level of impact, or location. In the example below, the widget has been configured to show locations impacted by provider outages.
Coming back to that same customer story I shared earlier, their reliance on the cloud and the Internet is only increasing. They recently shared with me that their use of Internet Insights has evolved from a network tool, to an enterprise planning resource. They’ve gone from using Internet Insights in a reactive, troubleshooting mode, to a proactive part of their planning process. For so many of our customers, executive reporting on Internet health is a growing need, and something we have supported via our Alerts API, but with today’s availability of network outage metrics for dashboards and reports, that’s something we support out of the box. Whether you are an IT professional or executive and you need to understand how Internet performance and provider quality is impacting customer digital experiences and employee productivity, you can trust Internet Insights™ to deliver.
Request a demo of Internet Insights today
ThousandEyes Global Internet Outages Map
Looking back to March of this year, we launched a map of global outages to give the public an ongoing insight into the state of the Internet. This always-on map shows a near real time view of recent and in-progress network outages impacting the end user experiences of customers and employees.
Go ahead and bookmark the map now, so that next time you experience an issue or ongoing outage, you can quickly determine if a provider you rely on is impacted.
The Internet Report, Powered by ThousandEyes Internet Insights™
In April, ThousandEyes launched “The Internet Report,” a new video podcast that uncovers what’s working and what’s breaking on the Internet to provide a deeper dive on recent outages, how they occurred and why.
ThousandEyes relies on the collective intelligence of Internet Insights, and so does the Internet Report. The most-watched episode of the year to date analyzed the August CenturyLink outage—one of the largest Internet outages ever recorded. subscribe and check out the most recent episode.
View the most recent episode of The Internet Report
Industry Accolades
In a year like this one, when our lives have become so dependent on online connectivity to work, study, and see our loved ones (i.e., to live our lives), the need for visibility into the network environment that lies outside of the traditional enterprise perimeter has never been greater, and it’s what makes our Network Computing New Cloud Solution of the Year Award win even sweeter.
To top things off, we also won Most Innovative Cloud Product in Computing’s Cloud Excellence Awards 2020. We couldn’t be more happy and proud that Internet Insights has had such a positive impact for so many of our customers. What better way to celebrate our one-year anniversary!
Looking ahead to year two, we remain laser-focused on giving our customers the Internet-scale insights they would be missing without our collective view. Our goal is to ensure their visibility to the macro-level issues impacting their networks and applications, as well as employee and customer experiences when their digital delivery moves increasingly to the Internet. And nothing means more to us than making our customers happy.
To learn more about Internet Insights, sign up for a custom demo with our team.