Well, it's already November, and we're in the final stretch of the year. It's been a big year for us, including our official Launch at Structure 2013, massive team growth, and a ton of really cool product updates. We’ve stayed on schedule for bi-weekly releases throughout the year, and have 4 remaining this year. I'll lay out some of the key product updates which have occurred in the last couple of months, in our first periodic ThousandEyes product update post.
Suffice it to say that it’s been fun, but we’re just getting started... Enjoy!
Virtual Appliances
Deploying private agents has never been so simple. Prepackaged virtual appliances, delivered in industry-standard OVF and Hyper-V formats allow fast deployment of private agents to nearly any type of target host. Deploy on a PC, Mac, Linux or an enterprise-class virtual host using our simple to use virtual appliances, which support proxied connection to the internet, and can be pre-packaged according to the needs of you, our customer.
Alerting Functionality
We've been through several iterations on our alerting functionality over the past year. From management of highly customizable alert rules and thresholds, to false-positive detection at the agent level, we've tuned our alerting infrastructure based on feedback from our customer base to make our alerting as timely and relevant as possible for our end users. Check out our CTO Ricardo's post on prescriptions for minimizing alert fatigue.
Sharing
Part of dealing with application performance in the context of the network is collaborating with other cross-functional teams, both within and outside of your organization: why send emails and work in separate systems when you can collaborate in the same system, seeing the same data?
To augment the capabilities of our Snapshot sharing capability, we’ve introduced the concept of Live sharing.
Live sharing allows the sharing of a test between two current customers of ThousandEyes, and is purpose-built to allow enterprises and their SaaS providers to share a live view of test results between their organizations. This tremendous capability facilitates collaboration by allowing SaaS providers to gain insight into test results from behind the Enterprise customer's firewall, without having access to any of the installed infrastructure.
We also released the concept of Saved Events, allowing users to save the results from a block of time around an event indefinitely. Saved events allow users to look at saved event baselines of tests, or specific issues impacting their infrastructure, making preservation and sharing of event data ever simpler.
Bandwidth Estimation
We've introduced TCP throughput analysis, which, unlike many solutions today, runs without having control of both endpoints and without transferring massive files, to help identify bottlenecked network paths transited from private agents.
For those interested in reading a thought-provoking blog post around TCP throughput model measurements, our own João Antunes recently wrote a blog post discussing a simple model for TCP throughput.
MPLS Tunnel Inference
In the last couple of months, we’ve honed our methods for inferring the existence and type of MPLS tunnels, for presentation using the Deep Path Analysis capability of ThousandEyes. This update provides heretofore-unseen transparency into transit MPLS networks, identifying labels of transited MPLS devices, which helps in identification and understanding of problems related to latency, obscured inside an MPLS network.
Single Sign-On
ThousandEyes now supports Single Sign-On, using Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) 2.0. Organizations leveraging SAML authentication can now integrate their third party identity provider into ThousandEyes for authentication into the platform, using a series of easy-to-follow steps, located here.
API
Our API was no stranger to updates, as customers worked on consuming data collected by ThousandEyes. We've introduced API versioning, added JSON support, added write capability, and the ability to run instant tests from private agents programmatically.
Our API has undergone significant changes recently, as we launched APIv3. From our new developer reference site to the underlying changes, we’re continuing to drive ease of use and accessibility of data. Stay tuned to this discussion forum for more updates.
Community and Feature Requests
From an overall customer perspective, we've also taken a proactive stance for curation of our community, whether in the area of requests from users, or our knowledge base. Our Customer Success Center is our customer portal, providing in-depth articles around the inner workings of our platform, user guides and screencasts, as well as an area for customers to post questions around challenging issues. We strongly encourage all customers to participate!
Have you ever had an idea for something cool that you could do with your data, or something was missing from a view in ThousandEyes? We've added a feature to the footer of our user interface to allow you to submit your requests; just enter your suggestion and our system will notify the product team!
Like this post? You can see our notes for each release under Release Notes in our Knowledge Base, or check back here: we’ll be publishing periodic rollups of our feature updates here, on the ThousandEyes blog.