What is ThousandEyes? How can it help an IT pro do his/her job better and where can it be used?
TE is a monitoring platform, which is cloud based (SaaS). It has an extensive network of probes, in many service providers, and on TE/cisco’s own infrastructure. Organizations can also run probes in their own environment, onprem and in the cloud, to add additional points of monitoring. The customer probes are called ‘Enterprise Agents’ and can run on various platforms.
This service is somewhat similar to a large botnet, completely public and intentional, with the TE service running it and telling its many monitoring agents (bots) what to do, based on customer needs and config. It’s the good monitoring botnet, where you pay to join (subscription) and allocate resources to help monitor. Not like the bad kind of botnet who steals your resources and use them to do bad stuff.
Use cases for it include an online store that wants to be alerted if customers are experiencing long response times on its site, before the customers actually complain (proactive alerts). Or an enterprise that wants to know if their AWS instance is providing the contracted performance.
Another use case is a large service provider that has slow connection to one of its customers and need a way to ‘prove’ it to the last mile connection operator or to the customer, so they are not blamed for the bad performance.
In all of those test cases, TE will also show additional info about how the traffic gets from source to target and can potentially help identify bottle necks.
Traditional network management is limited to the perimeter of the enterprise network, it doesn’t have the ability to monitor cloud services or internet based performance. TE provides a tool to overcome that limitation.
Here are some screenshots from the interface:
Dashboard overview of all the configured tests