Know How Your Users See You Online

Twitter Customer Story Video Transcript

Hi, my name is Matt Lee. I'm a network engineer at Twitter.

Most people think of Twitter, they see the tweets and stuff, but there's obviously photos and now we've got video, Periscope, Vine. 

So there's a lot of stuff coming through the pipes. 

So until one day this happened and, all of a sudden, traffic just disappeared, and we're like, "What the hell?"

We were looking at resolving problems in matters of maybe hours, opening a ticket with a provider and trying to reproduce that in order to give them some data to troubleshoot with.

Maybe it was DNS … That was still working. 

Then, maybe it was a reporting black hole … That wasn't it. 

And then we're thinking maybe the BGP, something, maybe somebody hijacked something, but nobody really had any reproducible data. 

Like how do you actually show what's really going on? Until we saw this.

Using ThousandEyes, we were actually able to get that data from remote parts of the world. 

That's a reproducible data that we can hand to the providers and troubleshoot faster and resolve the issue faster.

That's the same endpoint, you got the IP down here.

Using ThousandEyes to have everything visualized in one place, you can pinpoint exactly where the problem is and go fix it.

We've got Philadelphia, Belgium, Russia, they're all going through this endpoint down here at the end. 

And this is a router in Tokyo, so that's obviously not desirable.

My favorite feature of ThousandEyes is definitely the path visualization. 

It takes into account equal-cost paths across the Internet and makes routing problems extremely obvious.

At Twitter, we currently have around a hundred users that are actually using ThousandEyes on some sort of regular basis. 

Most of those people are not network engineers, but they are application engineers that are trying to understand the network. 

And then of course our network operations team is watching this pretty closely on a regular basis, so it's a pretty popular product at Twitter.

Using ThousandEyes, we're able to keep the tweets flowing that way.